The business principles are the same whether you are a restaurant, auto shop, dentist, what have you. Some people want a simple mechanic in the back row of a warehouse park. Some people want a high level of service. There is room for both. I have friends who eat out maybe 6 times a year because they find it a poor use of their money. I’d be happy eating out 6 times a week.
I think not enough Americans take the time, when they walk in to a business of any kind, to think “I wonder if the people who work here get sick days.” As to the effect of health care, for a typical independent auto shop, several years ago the monthly health insurance premium became the top expense, in many cases eclipsing monthly rent and utilities combined. I owned my own shop from 2008 to 2016, and at one time I found myself telling my crew “Don’t get sick. I had to raise your deductible to $5000 because that’s the only way I can afford to cover you without throwing you on the open market.”
The cost of providing mechanics and office staff with quality medical coverage and paid sick time is quite costly, and is reflected in the higher rates the customer pays. I am happy to spend my money at local businesses that treat their employees well.
I don’t want to start anything and I know all about risk pools, etc. But just something to consider what you would do if you were required to repair and service everyone in town for the same monthly price. How much would you charge per month to make sure you were covered for the folks with 200,000 mile cars that could care less about them and the ones with new cars? You gotta charge enough to stay in business and all the while people will be complaining about their monthly fees being too high. The model just doesn’t work.
Just to bring this back to life. I just bought top of the line front and rear pads, rotors, and brake hardware from RockAuto for a bit over $300. The equivalent parts would have cost me close to $800 at Napa. I would not want to pay a garage that marks up Napa pricing. A place like Canadian Tire will offer similar prices to Napa for lesser quality products. With auto parts as in anything— Buyer beware.
One of our local auto parts chains (Sanel Brothers) is now NAPA - now called Sanel NAPA. They are still independently owned an operated by the Sanel family. And they still sell parts to mechanics at a good discounted price. And I haven’t seen a price increase in their parts.
How do you know they are equivalent parts? Are they the same brands? Same part number? Does that $300 include the cost of shipping? RA has pretty high shipping cost.
And finally, if your Napa stocks the parts you need, you are paying for that convenience. It costs money to store those parts on the shelf until you need them. RA takes 3 to 5 days to ship. If you can afford to let your car sit for 5 days waiting for parts, that is Ok.
I also would like to know how those are equivalent parts?
As for me, I seldom ever buy online car parts. Shipping if often too costly, don’t feel like waiting for days or weeks for them to arrive, and don’t want to run the risk of increasing any delays because someone sent the wrong or defective parts.
Do you expect your mechanic to tie up your car and his shop waiting for parts from Rock Auto and would you be willing to pay him for storing your car?
Yes, you can buy parts cheaper online and yes you can save a ton of money doing it yourself.
That does not mean your mechanic is ripping you off by following normal retail practice. You appliance repairman charges retail price for the parts he uses to repair your appliances, when your car dealer repairs your car they charge you list price for their parts, not their cost, plus their $125 or so labor rates. They only pay their mechanics a small fraction of the labor rate. Why aren’t you complaining about that?
Do your mechanic a big favor, do ALL your own work!
Before I retired, time was money. If it was a quick repair like replacing an alternator which took about half an hour on my 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass, I went to NAPA. I bought an alternator with a lifetime guarantee. I don’t know if NAPA counted on me keeping the car 33 years, but I exchanged the alternator at least once. I replaced the blower motor a couple of times, but only paid for the first one.
I can understand a shop marking up parts. It takes time to order the part and perhaps go pick up the part. When I was in graduate school, I had a Rambler and there was no AMC dealer in town. The parts had to be ordered through a dealer 55 miles away. My car was laid up for almost two weeks waiting for the main shaft and main drive gear for the manual transmission. Fortunately, we lived in married student housing and had bus service to campus. However, carrying groceries from a little mom and pop grocery six blocks away wasn’t much fun. I learned quickly that I wanted a popular make and could leave it at a local shop and get it back in a reasonable amount of time.
My 05 4runner had a design flaw with the front calipers. After my first replacement set started sticking again after only 30k miles I went to NAPA and bought the life-time calipers. They weren’t much more then another other parts store. NAPA replaced those calipers at least 6 times under warranty.
I kinda hate perpetuating an old thread but having some auto repair clients, there’s some good reasons for the markup that have nothing to do with profit.
Fred or Wilma brings in their car with a problem so it’s up on the lift to find out what “thingamabob” is causing the problem and then the fun begins.
First there’s the research to find out exactly which “thingamabob” the manufacturer on that make, model, option they were using that month, followed by hours on the phone trying to find who hasa decent quality part locally or more likely, who can get it before you reach retirement age or you succumb to “Death by Muzak”.
Hopefully you have an account at the parts store and they have a delivery service or you have to pay your own guy to pick it up but eventually it arrives.
You double check the numbers, compare it to the part your removed and surprise, surprise, it looks different. Back on the phone again, probably have to show the rep the differences so he can located the right part, more time shot but you’ve got the right part and it’s finally in the car.
Box up the core, wait for the refund from the reman company and you’re finally done but at the end of the week the owner’s scratching his head and wondering, “Why the hell did we only get 30 cars through here?!”
Now not all jobs are like this, most of them aren’t, but unless you’re running a specialty shop, it’s pretty common and customers don’t seem to appreciate a bill that includes. “1 hour to find the right parts”.
But what the customer doesn’t see and the Book doesn’t include is all the time you had to spend just to getting the right part
One runs into parts delays even at new car dealerships. What used to grate on me to no end was why in the world the parts department was heavily stocked with things like tail lamp lenses, front license brackets, center console lids, and other parts for cars which could otherwise be driven until an ordered part arrived.
While that was going on one would find that parts needed for everyday use were not in stock. I had an older Subaru’s rear brake drums off once and discovered we had one pair of brake shoes in stock. Now why in the world would 2 shoes be in stock when it takes 4…
The service manager wanted me to “replace the 2 worst shoes” and call it good. Not gonna happen…
At a SAAB dealer the sales manager sent his SAAB demonstrator back to service for an oil change. I rolled the oil drain underneath, got the oil draining, and threw the oil filter into the trash bin.
I go to parts and find that we do not have any oil filters for any year/model of SAAB. The sales manager was outraged (not at me) and threw a fit. There was no option but to fish the old filter out of the trash and reinstall it as he did not want an aftermarket filter on it.
So for a .2 hours oil change I spent over an hour of time wrestling with it and since this was on a Friday afternoon it put me behind on a “must go out today” SAAB.
I removed an oil filter, walked into our warehouse . . . at our shop, the mechanics get their own parts and charge them out . . . only to find an empty shelf where the oil filter I needed should have been
I also had to reuse the old filter. Fortunately, it was still in reasonable shape.
From that point on, I NEVER removed an oil filter until I had the new one in my hand
I actually saw that exact scenario happen . . .
The boss wanted one of my colleagues to only change the 2 worst shoes.
and the mechanic complied . . .
By doing so, the mechanic labeled himself as substandard, as far as I’m concerned
Not surprisingly, that same mechanic has shown other tendencies which aren’t exactly high quality
Yeah, I flat refused to install 2 new shoes while using 2 bad ones; and it would have taken one new shoe on each side. The SM was a bit agitated with me but I didn’t care. I guarantee you that if the car had come back a week or month later with pulsation or noise problems the SM would have tried to hang it on me as a comeback.
Some service managers don’t seem to mind corner cutting until they face an irate customer and then it becomes finger pointing time. This happened to me at Nissan. A truck came in with a bad engine from lack of oil. A chunk broke out of the cast harmonic balancer and chewed up the front seal. They wanted it rebuilt. Once torn down I turned a list of parts over to the parts dept and a new balancer was on the list.
The SM came out the next day and said he stopped the order on the balancer. Why? Well, I know someone who can fix it. Against my repeated warnings he did it anyway. Got the balancer back and it wouldn’t fit the crank nose as the hole in the balancer was now egged from welding heat.
Sends it back to the machine shop while I’m still saying it’s a mistake.
Got it back, reassembled the engine and all was well; for a month.
SM comes out one day and say I have a comeback on this Nissan truck engine. What happened? The same thing I was telling him from the get go. The welded piece broke back out again, chewed up the seal, and the engine lost all of the oil again.
This led to a ruckus between the SM and me and I told him if anyone had a comeback it was on him. He’s the one who insisted on spending 60 bucks cobbling together a balancer when the new one was 37 dollars. The company ended up putting a boneyard engine in for the guy and thankfully it turned out to be good or he would have tried to blame a bad one on me which would have led to Ruckus 2…
Yes, the guy was a tool and a fool. He even made the comment when he became SM. “I don’t even know why I’m here other than I start a new career every 7 years”.
His next career was county commissioner. He endeared himself to everyone in his district when he ordered 6 miles of county highway torn up to be resurfaced. Once torn up he realizes he doesn’t have the money to pave it; so it sat torn up for 4 years with a 35 MPH speed limit until the next cty comm. came along and resolved it
His next career was head loan officer at a bank where me and him got crossways over a car the bank held a lien on and the owner had died. It was in my shop halfway back together and he and the bank refused to choose 1 of 3 options. Pay me and take it as is, finish it up and pay me, or give me the title because that’s what is about to happen with a mechanic’s lien. They refused, I finished the car, and got a title on my own. They did send a repo guy around one time trying to get access to the car but he was sent packing by a next door business owner.
And clowns like this are often the ones calling the misguided shots in the shop. Pardon the length of this essay; or rant if you will.
Our mechanic’s prices end up being the same as you’d pay over the counter at Autozone, at least the few times we’ve even looked. They put in a radiator slightly more expensive than the brand they normally used because we could have the car back on the road the next afternoon.
They give you the manufactures warranty or better on parts and the rare occasion we had to make a claim they said that the repair would be covered by warranty before we had to ask. Fixed a trans fluid leak that was the reason there was a slight noise when shifting gears (manual transmission) New CV shafts on both sides (Only one was chewing up the axle seal but they replaced both to be sure)
They’ve spent the last 27yrs asking what they could do to earn more business, keep adding services including a shuttle van. They’ve expanded to take the entire commercial building instead of just the little corner they had back in 1993.
I keep reading about how dealers overprice parts and service. I just got back from the body shop of the dealer about half mile away. We got new license plates the other day and I was going to put the new plates on our vehicles. I couldn’t get one bolt loose. I finally realized that I was going to have to get out my Dremel tool, cut a slot in the bolt, and see if I could back it out with a flat blade screw driver. Mrs. Triedaq was tired of me turning the air blue and suggested I take it to the body shop. The technician had an air powered grinder, cut a slot in the bolt, backed it out with a screwdriver and wouldn’t take any money.
I have had the shop do work for me before. I think a good relationship with a shop really pays off.
Some years ago I found a quite good locally owned independent shop I used for all work on my then aging car. They truly earned my trust. Twice since when buying a new car they generously gave me time and advice in answer to questions I had about comparative reliability, real use performance, and maintenance costs between my narrowed down list of possible vehicles, engines, and transmissions. (As so generously did regulars here in the forum!)
They knew they would be getting less business from me for a few years with my having a new car but still strongly advised my getting the new car for the relative safety of a more reliable car than the old one had become.
I frequently recommend the shop to others and have posted good reviews online.
As to a body shop, the one I used for repairs after getting hit head on a few years ago not only did a good job on the repairs, when I got back the car they had given the entire car a great wax job and detailed the interior with something that has kept the dash easier to keep clean and noticeably lessened outgassing film building up on the windshield inside. And they thanked me for bringing them one of the cleanest cars inside and out they’ve ever worked on. If I ever again need body work on a car, they have my business. And again, I posted a positive review online.
Courteous consideration is two way in both personal and business relationships.
Edit: And the body shop straightened out the badly damaged front license plate such it is still usable.
@Marnet. I first used the body shop about 10 years ago when an older woman bumped our new minivan when it was parked in the parking lot at Lowe’s. The car was pulled in next to our minivan, so I waited for the owner of the car to come out of the store. She was an older woman and didn’t want to turn the cost of the repair into her insurance company. She wanted me to take my minivan to the body shop where she said they knew her. I took the car to that body shop and found out the woman was one of their best clients. It turned out that the woman who hit our minivan lived in a house on our walking route and her housemate was a colleague at the university where I taught for 44 years and I knew this person. The body shop did another job when I got bumped in Walmart’s parking lot about 6 years later. I did notice last spring when my wife and I took our morning fitness walk that the house where the woman who hit my car and the former colleague lived had been sold. I had to have a rusted skid plate replaced on our 4Runner, so I asked the woman who manages the body shop about the woman who had hit my car 10 years earlier. I found out that both the woman who hit my car are now in an assisted care facility and my former colleague has dimentia.
Some years back, I bought a new 2000 Ford Windstar at a small Ford dealership about 15 miles away in the next county. The Windstar would die when I released the accelerator. I called the agency and since I had about three hours before my next class, I nursed the car to the dealer. As I was waiting for the diagnosis, a young girl went up to the service counter and asked if anyone knew anything about geometry. When nobody volunteered to help, I volunteered. I showed her how to do a couple of problems and then had her work the rest of her assignment for me. When I took the loaner car back the next afternoon, there was a note on my ticket to see the owner of the agency. The young student I helped was his daughter. This helped me establish a wonderful working relationship with the dealer. Had Ford had not discontinued making minivans, I would still be a customer of that dealer.
I was pleasantly surprised to find, on many things, my local Ford dealer sells parts for less or equal to the Napa store right next door. Motorcraft branded parts, lubricants and chemicals at prices that have beat Napa’s prices as well as Amazon’s Prime price. Plus, I walk out the door with the part instead of waiting a couple of days for Amazon to deliver.
I can still get Motorcraft brake rotors cheaper at Amazon, for some reason.
this is a bit old, but also as a fleet mechanic- I will “charge” an hour to clean out a truck. That way my boss will notice it. If he notices it enough, he starts getting on the drivers about it. He knows that this time, even if not flat rate for me, is time I could spend doing other tasks.
