Customer parts

General Discussion
1

For all those people arguing about customer supplied parts: from a technician’s point of view…some technicians get paid on “flat rate”, meaning that they have a certain hourly wage and however many labor hours they turn out, whether weekly or biweekly, that is the number of hours they get paid for with said wages. Others, like me, make a percentage of commission off of parts and labor. so if i do a job that pays 2 hours labor and the part is $200, and the customer brings his own part, I am essentially doing to same job for roughly half the price. No way…waste of my time.

And what if I do install customer supplied parts? Let’s say the part is defective or something, and I install it anyway, even if I tell them up front about no warranty. Who would be to blame in this situation, the dumb dumb customer, or the professional who chose to do shoddy work, instead of something that he could stand behind and be proud of? More often than not, the technician gets blamed and the shop ends up eating the cost.

I have heard of court cases where customers sued shops for installing customer parts and the vehicle had problems after the fact, even though there was a disclaimer in writing stating that the shop was not liable, and it was signed by the customer. Guess who had the pay up? The shop, the judges tended to rule that the technician was the professional and should have known better. Not to mention all the hours of work missed by the employees because of having to sit in court for days on end. i could go on for days. the general pubic can be pretty dumb sometimes. you can always go somewhere else.

If all you care about is bargain prices instead of quality work, then you were never my customer in the first place. Let’s not forget that you probably rely on that vehicle on a daily basis to get you to and from work, etc…and you wife probably drives your kids around in it. If you want to slap $10 brake pads on a rotor that has been grinded on for weeks on your family minivan and is probably to the point of being unsafe, I am not your man…"You mean to tell me, sir, that you will not put tires on this vehicle with the cords showing simply because “it is my wife’s car, I don’t drive it.” I thought you guys loved each other? Oh well, that is your choice, i told you about it so if you leave here, blow a tire and flip into a ditch, or worse, your wife does…it is not my fault…ph there is more…

2

I know where you are coming from, and many others here do as well. This has been discussed at length, as well as parts markup, which many people think is the shop ripping them off. There are plenty of threads in the archives that pretty much go as such: “This shop quoted me $300 for part X, but I found out I can order it online for as little as $120. Why is this lousy good for nothing shop ripping me off?” Customer priorities can also be frustrating. I once had a minivan in the shop that had bald tires with cords showing, loose ball joints and tie rod ends, brakes shot, and the customer had me doing $800 worth of work to the air conditioning system! His reasoning: “The wife and kids are taking this car to Chicago for the weekend. Gotta have that air conditioning working.”

3

If I want to supply my own parts, I also supply my own labor.

The only exception is when I bought a parts car, largely for its engine. I’m not equipped for an engine swap. So I brought my shop that used “part” to install. They were ok with that.

4

I’m in the hvac business. We are starting to get customers wanting to supply their own parts or they look up part costs while we are in their basement. The arguement usually starts with "I can buy this part online for only $32 and you want to charge me $480? You are all crooks! Usually after explaining the cost of doing business, ($38,000 truck, $20,000 inventory in the truck, $29,000 per truck per year insurance, 12,000 per truck per year office support, depreciation, fuel, warranty, bad debt, advertising, pension, vacation, etc) most understand and let us continue with the job. After 25 year I’ve found that you don’t want everyone for your customer.You just hope they will torment your competition. Or we tell them to look for someone on craigslist.

5

I’ve tried that argument on customers before, but they still seem to think the building, its fixtures, the inventory, the toolboxes, the scantools, etc simply sprouted out of the ground, there is no real overhead with running a repair shop, and we technicians are simply a bunch of greedy SOB’s wallowing in the big bucks while the customer has to take it up the tailpipe. In all reality, many shops are doing well just to stay afloat and most technicians are doing exceptionally well if they break 40 grand a year. Heck, I never managed to break 30 grand a year repairing cars, so I went to working on plastic blowmolding equipment. It pays better and requires fewer tools, and if I tell someone the machine needs $30,000 worth of parts to fix it, they say, “So??? Fix it!” I still love working on cars and still do it on the side every once in a while (mostly for friends and family), but am glad to be away from the business.

6

Sorry folks, not to be contrary but . . . Now I don’t except in rare cases try to supply a part but it is plain bad personnel policy and business management to pay a technician for the parts they use. Labor is labor and parts should be competitively priced for the quality of the part. A $32 part should include the carrying cost of having the part on hand but not pay for the truck or business overhead, insurance, tools, training and so on for the technician who installs it so that the supposed price of the part balloons to $480. I understand that labor rates include the wages paid, insurance, trucks, fuel, tools, training, supervision, and shop equipment to name a few but it is just plain dumb to try and merge parts to pay for labor-from the standpoint of the customer anyway. If you must do that, then just give a blanket total without itemizing the labor, parts, shop supplies, etc.

7

Bing,
We became a flat rate company 10 years ago. It was the best thing we ever did. The customer is aware of a $96 trip/diagnostc charge on the phone. After diagnosis we quote a price fo the repair including markup and labor combined. We will not tell them how much an hour of labor costs. I’m tired of customers telling me my 30 years of experience, 5 years apprenticeship, and 2 years tech school is not worth a decent wage. We NEVER itemize a job. We price our jobs with a set markup on the parts and average out what our experience tells us what a job should require for labor. We just tell people about all the expenses that go into getting that truck in their driveway in a timely manner. The worst part about the public is that they can see value in a part but not in the labor. I’ve literally had a guy tell me “labors free!”

8

P S
The hvac industry had started to price jobs like the auto repair guys. Upfront before the job and an authorization signature before the work is started, and we still occasionally have a problem with a recalcitrant customer. I don’t kow how you guys in the auto repair business do it without losing your minds. The public seems to be getting dumber every year.

9

I’m in agreement with Dino although I’ve never earned a commission on parts nor do I know any mechanic that has. Personally, I’d be all for it as it could help alleviate some of the pressure and unfairness of the flat rate system; a system that in my opinion just sucks beyond all belief and should be outlawed.

Assume labor for a small job is 100 dollars for the sake of discussion and the 50 dollar part is also a 100 after markup for a total of 200 dollars. Knock the markup on the part down for a total cost of 60 dollars and this means the labor total will probably be 140. This leaves someone facing a 200 dollar bill anyway.

If someone enters a hospital the parts provided there (aspirin, sutures, you name it) all go towards a variety of expenses including labor. They don’t simply rely on the room charge to cover it all.
Next time someone gets a hospital bill peruse that and look at the markup they slap on the most simple of items; 5 bucks for a generic aspirin, 10 bucks for a Band-Aid, 10 dollars for an OTC Tylenol, and so on.

10

The worst part of ‘‘customer supplied parts’’ is that this situation is 90% coupled with ‘‘customer supplied diagnosis’’ as well.
Then, of course, it’s all your fault that the vehicle is not correctly repaired or it has additional related problems.

OR
Customer brings just one part of a multi-part list required for that job.
Do we twiddle our thumbs and lose valuable stall time waiting for them to bring more parts ?
Or do we charge out the related additional parts on the r.o. ?

11

Usually after explaining the cost of doing business, ($38,000 truck, $20,000 inventory in the truck, $29,000 per truck per year insurance, 12,000 per truck per year office support, depreciation, fuel, warranty, bad debt, advertising, pension, vacation, etc)

It would frankly be more honest of you to tack on the overhead surcharge to the labor cost, not the part cost. “I work for $xx/hour” hides the overhead surcharge until it’s too late for the customer to shop around without creating an awkward situation.

Awhile ago I got hammered by some on this board for complaining that a shop wanted to charge me $600 to replace a master cylinder. $300-odd of that was the cost of the part, which IS a $40 part. $600 for a 30 minute job using a $40 part means they’re making $520 an hour just off of my car, and they have 5 bays. They’re charging a LOT more than overhead for that job, and frankly charging that much for such a fast job with such a cheap part is highway robbery - especially since the guy actually doing the work is seeing only a fraction of that windfall. Fortunately, I know how to work on cars, so I didn’t get fleeced (I only brought it to them because I was being lazy in the first place).

I have no problem with charging enough to cover overhead and make a profit, but had they charged something more reasonable, like $300, they’d have made money rather than losing a customer.

As for customer-supplied parts, the only time I get annoyed is when the shop will not order the part I want put in, and will not take the part if I bring it to them. That’s actually what got me started working on my own cars. I wanted Porterfield brake pads on my old CRX, and they refused to order them, and wouldn’t let me bring them a set, so I started reading and learned to do the job myself. That boneheaded refusal on the part of the shop to order a perfectly good (and frankly far superior) product ended up losing a lot of mechanics a lot of money over the years since I now do almost everything myself.

12

I do most of my own maintence myself, but there are some jobs where I’ll defer to a mechanic. The guy I use the most used to own a speed shop, but it turns out he likes working on cars more than the did running the business side of things. So he sold the business and setup a small garage, most of his clientle are “car guys” whose cars are heavily modfied, as such, most of his customers are very particular about the parts used on their cars and the supply their own parts most of the time. The mechanic will gladly install install whatever you bring him, with the understanding that his warranty is on labor only. He’s not cheap ($90/hr for labor, while most other shops in the area charge around $60-$70/hr), but he’s very good, I’ve had him install Kenne Bell supercharger on my car as well as a set of Brembos and haven’t had any issue with him. It also helps that he’s pretty knowledable as well about aftermarket mods. If I were to take my car to a typical shop, let’s say for to get the spark plugs changed, they may very well use stock plugs, which on my car would be the incorrect heat range because of the supercharger.

13

If I take my car to a shop to have a job done, I want them to do all the work–secure the parts, install the parts, etc. When I did more of my own work, then I did it all. It takes time to track down parts–there are telephone calls involved and sometimes someone in the shop has to go after the parts. This takes time and the shop needs to be compensated for its time.
One small service station where I traded until it closed would sometimes send me after the parts. I was on good terms with the owner. I would put on a jacket with the name of the shop and take his service truck to the auto parts store where he had an account. I would pick up not only the part for my car, but parts he needed for other customers. He would then charge me his cost for the parts for my car when I ran this errand.
I’ve seen too many good shops close that had a great mechanic as the proprietor. Unfortunately, these good mechanics weren’t good businessmen–they were too accomodating to people.