The price of the part on the internet is irrelevant. The price of the part at the Ford dealer is irrelevant. The price of the part at XYZ Garage is irrelevant. What matters is the total cost of getting your window working again. The internet can’t do that. The Ford dealer, XYZ Garage, and the shop where I work can do that. You can compare the prices and level of service between the 3 and decide which one or none.
My wife and I were on a trip to the coast this weekend and had a fantastic dinner at a beachfront restaurant. It was over $100. We could have filled our stomachs across the street at Subway for $20, but we wanted a view, good service, the highest quality food and drinks and a luxury setting. Not once did I think about the fact that they were taking $8 worth of halibut and turning it into a $35 meal.
Exactly my point. People bringing their own parts sometimes bring parts of unknown quality. Or in this case known. That brand has proven over the years to be of such abysmal quality that I refuse to sell anything of theirs. If you were considering that part I would suggest you go to a wrecking yard and buy one because I have more confidence in a used part than that brand.
Yes. I can show reason after reason why my total profit per job needs to be just a little higher than the shop down the street. Some of which may not make sense to a Canadian (I take it correctly that’s where you’re from?). One such reason is a conversation I recently overheard between 2 other employees here:
“Did you hear Ray from Tom’s Garage down the street broke both his ankles in a motorcycle accident? Yeah it sucks for him because his job doesn’t provide health insurance and he only gets one week vacation per year.”
You are perfectly welcome to take your business to Tom’s Garage where they can charge less for parts and labor but understand there’s a big-picture cost to a lower price that can’t be found by simply comparing numbers on a screen.
I have been known to add labor time to a job for cars that come in like that. We’re nice about it, but if we need to spend half an hour clearing out and cleaning a car to do a heater core job I’m going to charge you for it.
But if such a vehicle comes in, I do account for my time
We have to show x number of hours each day, and we’re supposed to break it down
For example, 0.25hrs for a typical engine oil and filter change, 1hr for a regularly scheduled service on your typical small car and/or class 1 light truck, and so on . . .
If I have to vacuum out such a disgusting vehicle which I described, I’ll usually “charge” 0.5hrs
I put charge in parentheses because I work for a fleet, and there is no physical person who’s paying the bill
I had a situation where I thought I needed a part and a shop found away around replacing the part. I had a 23 year old Oldsmobile with 225,000 miles on the odometer. The left door was sagging and I had to lift up on it to get it to close. The car had bucket seats, so it was hard to slip over and go out the passenger side door. I thought about leaving the left window open and enter and exit the car like the fellows entered the General Lee on the Dukes of Hazzard. However, if it rained, I didn’t want to sit on a wet seat. I went to an independent body shop. The technician said he would replace the worn hinge if I would supply the part. He thought my best shot would be a wrecking yard. He doubted that the dealer would be able to get a new part. Well, the cars that might have a hinge that would fit had long since sent the cars to the crusher. I decided to try the Oldsmobile dealer that had a body shop. The woman who managed the body shop looked at the car and said that the part was no longer available. I told her that when I bought the car from her agency, the salesman told me that the dealer would always be able to take care of any repairs, parts or services the car might need. The body shop manager then said, “We didn’t expect you to keep the car 23 years and drive it 225,000 miles. I’ll see what I can do”. She went back into the shop and came back with a technician who had a long box end wrench, a long drift pin and a sledge hammer. He loosened the bolts on the hinge, put the drift pin against the bottom of the hinge and pounded on it. He then tightened up the bolts and tried the door. It worked perfectly. When I asked about the cost, he said “There is no charge. We guarantee these babies 25 years or 250,000 miles”. He and the woman who managed the body shop were laughing up a storm. This was a case where I got away without a part.
I told one of my musician friends, Marilyn, about my experience. She knew the manager of the body shop as she had had the woman in class some years back and really liked her. A year later, we had a mirror that got damaged on my wife’s car. I went back to the Oldsmobile dealer’s body shop. The manager recognized me and said “You won’t get away for free this time”. I replied “Oh yes I will. You can just put this on Marilyn’s bill”. The manager laughed and then said, “You know Marilyn? She was one of the best teachers I ever had”. She then asked about Marilyn. I have found through the years that I get really good service when I make connections with people.
Somewhere in my basement I have some tapes of old radio shows. The Aldrich Family, Abbot and Costello, etc. They left the commercials in when they made the tapes, and that slogan is in most of them. After explaining that more doctors smoke them, they tell you that it’s “good for the T-zone, T for taste, T for throat.”
As a high school kid in the early 90’s, those ads always struck me as beyond bizarre from a modern perspective. The only good thing that came out of cigarettes was the cigarette lighter in cars, which meant I could take the cigarette lighter out and plug my CB radio into the socket without having to wire it in permanently.
@shadowfax. I remember the Jack Benny show on the radio and the sponsor was Lucky Strike cigarettes. There was a male quartet called the Sportsmen Quartet that sang the Lucky Strike commercial.
Cigarette smoking was really promoted and made attractive back in the 1950s and 1960s. Interestingly, the university where I taught from 1965 to 2011 was a smoke free campus until 1946 when the GIs came home after WW II and went to school on the GI Bill. Many of these returning servicemen were smokers and nobody was going to tell them not to smoke on campus. Interestingly, the campus became smoke free again in the late 1980s.
Interestingly Fort Jackson is now smoke free. You can train to get shot at and killed but you can’t smoke. Hilarious. Of course I understand not giving away your position in a combat situation but something wrong when you can’t have a smoke after a camp out or ten mile march. One wonders how we determine our priorities sometimes or just follow those that bellow like lemmings as our governor used to say. You may not like him but he did not mince words.
When I went to high school, there was a smoking lounge for the teachers, when my kids started high school in the very early 70s, there was already a smokers lounge for the students.
Easy. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Your right to smoke ends when you’re blowing it into my lungs. Not too many opportunities to smoke without forcing other people to smoke when you’re in the barracks.
Plus, it stands to reason that we want our soldiers to be in top physical form, you know, so they can fight effectively. Wheezing after walking across the base because they’ve given themselves smoker’s lung isn’t a very good tactical decision.
Sure I understand that logic but they seemed to do fine in WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam although smoking was not allowed in boot camp. Just seems a little PC is all. But I have to say the new recruits are far more gung ho than the draftees. I’m not convinced this has been a positive thing though for the country. I like Israel where everyone serves their time, male and female, just to get off the subject for a minute.
Asemaster, you do not need to sell me as to why you are the most expensive shop, and you should not try to convince me that you are like a restaurant. As you point out there are lots of price points in the food industry, and I can easily find you places that charge 4 times or more the prices of a traditional family restaurant. When buying auto services I have never felt like spending for a view, ambiance, or splurging on a high price bottle of wine.
Again for about the fourth time, the scenario I describe is not me coming in asking for a diagnosis or needing you to make my car run. Instead, it is about me deciding my struts have passed 150,000kms and I desire to replace them. Based upon your part pricing structure I would have to spend an extra 300 or 400 for the parts. I prefer to pay a mechanic for his labor, and I know enough about business that I am willing to find a place in an industrial park that has a far lower lease rate, and lower overhead, than a banner store on the main drag. Forgive me but I learned that I can shop for automotive services by phone, and book a time for the job in advance. If you are not interested in doing it, all you have to do is say no and I will move on and call another place.
Big picture is yes I am Canadian and as a country we decided that everyone deserves health care a good while ago. The shops I deal with are Canadian and there is no such big picture that the lower priced shops can only exist by stiffing their employees on health care. Here as well there are different shops that charge different prices and have different policies. Its a free market as it should be. As I have explained your extending warranty on your work does increase your cost, and I would expect that to be seen in your pricing. As I said if I waive your extended warranty there is no downstream comeback risk or potential cost, so I would seek to negotiate a bit
I am sure you have a professional shop and do good work, you are just not the kind of place I would look to deal with, and obviously I am not the type of client you wish to deal with. I am glad you have a good business, and I am glad that the guys who work with me seem to have good ones as well.
I visited the War Museum in Ottawa not very long ago and it reminded me that war always involves an environment that is tough on the lungs From diesel fuel, to poison gases, and nerve agents , to dust levels, to oil well fires, etc. Most of the lung damage is seen afterwards. Smoking cigarettes is not good for you, but its not going harm the performance of most in shape 18 to 20 year olds. What is interesting to me is that supposedly asthma rates have increased in the younger generations during a period in which smoking has decreased substantially in society.
In the 70’s, along with the crackers, peaches, and whatever meat that was, C rations contained a 5 pack of cigarettes for everyone. Not your brand? You traded with others or from the non smokers. Everyone was happy and on base, $3 a carton. Of course in VN it was the wacky tobacco causing a problem that everyone now wants to legalize, and the real danger was agent orange with the current far reaching effects. Even those just using air craft that had transported the stuff were exposed and have had kids with problems. Smoking indeed, our number one health problem. Turns out Johnson’s Pentagon caused the agent orange issue by insisting the manufacture be fast tracked to the field. Some truth when we said not to trust anyone over 30. Oh man did I go off track but it’s history many just ignore today.
So my dad had a few brain tumors, and other cancers, had to watch a couple of nuclear explosions at sea wearing sunglasses, but we blame his brand new 58 impala that was totaled 3 weeks after purchase on the street in Duluth as his biggest heartbreak.
My cousin was killed in his 58 Chevy Impala. I think it was a year old or something. Hit a bridge on the way home from an Army Reserve meeting. That 348 ci was in the front seat. I always suspected he might have tipped a few after the meeting but no one ever said anything about it, but it was still a dark and rainy night. Man, 60 years and stuff still sticks with ya. The neighbor girl had her folks 58 Impala and killed a guy on a motor cycle. Then they replaced it with a 58 Buick. I don’t know what ever happened to her but not something easy for a teenager to live with the rest of her life. Maybe those 58 Impalas were just bad luck or something. We had a 58 Yeoman and nothing really bad happened that I remember.
58 was the first year of the infamous X frame Chevys. Nascar considered them so unsafe that they made the guys running 58 Chevy bodies and engines to do so on 57 frames.
