But, low oil price changes are there fir other reasons that are still money makers. Too frequent oli changes is a money maker in subtle ways too. You can be duped into too frequent service for other items too by unscrupulous service providers…" like gee, your auto trans fluid looks a little dark, you might want to change it too " to which your response should be, " you mean the same fluid I had changed less then 10 k ago" There is nothing like keeping records to save money !
The problem is that the guys working on the cars have no say-so on policies regarding how they get paid.
Because most jobs pay a fixed salary, fixed per hour wage, or what have you and people know what their check is each week or month.
Flat rate is a whole different ball game.
“I don’t see how that’s different from any other job.”
@asecular: I don’t know what you do for a living or how you get paid, but let me try to draw an analogy to the way many flat-rate technicians work.
I hire you to make cheeseburgers. I’ll pay you $1 per burger you make. I’ll provide the raw ingredients, apron, and a grill, you provide your own knives, tongs, spatula, cutting board, gloves, etc.
You’ll make $1 per burger whether it’s a plain burger ketchup only or a triple-decker with everything and a fried egg on top, whether it takes you 30 seconds or 8 minutes.
You are exempt from earning overtime pay for over 40 hours per week. I may decide to pay you overtime if I feel like it but I’m not required to.
We’re running a special on burgers this month, so I’m reducing your pay to .75 per burger. Don’t worry, you’ll make it up on volume because you’ll be making so many more.
Our supplier gave us a bad batch of meat. As a result, we have to replace the last 10 burgers you made at no charge. That means I won’t be paying you to remake those burgers either. However you have no input as to whether I continue to use the same supplier.
When things are slow I will ask you to make up some sample burgers that we can give away. I won’t pay you for that either.
Central office issued a recall on the buns we use. As a result we’re remaking burgers at no charge to the customer but central office is only authorizing .60 to you for each burger. Sorry.
I know your shift is over in 15 minutes but I just sold 25 burgers and I need those right away.
Anyone here can correct me if I’m wrong but this is why mechanics are constantly trying to find ways to beat the labor time guides.
50% of auto technicians don’t have access to medical and dental insurance through their jobs. 30% don’t get things like overtime pay, paid holidays or vacation time.
I guess if I owned a car repair shop, I’d charge everything by the hour. If the job took 15 minutes, that’s what I’d charge. If it took 4 hours, likewise, I’d charge the customer 4 X the shop’s hourly billing rate.
I expect I’d lose some customers, like if they brought the car in for an oil change, which they thought would be a 30 minute job, so they were expecting to pay $45, but it turned out the drain plug had been installed too tight a prior shop, cracked, and was leaking and needed another hour and 1/2 of tech work to straighten the situation out, so the charge turned out to be $180 instead.
On the other hand I expect some customers would like that they only had to pay $20 to fix the problem which caused their ABS dash light to come on, because the tech found it was just a connector that came loose.
The burger analogy is a great one. 
And for just a tiny sample of what mechanics go through, peruse this. The other thing to consider is that in spite of a court win, those mechanics are going to end up on the short end of the stick. Guaranteed.
http://www.martindale.com/appellate-practice-law/article_Fisher-Phillips-LLP_1702562.htm
@GeorgeSanJose, you’ve got it backwards. Charging the same hourly rate for every one and billing actual labor time would mean that your best most capable people would make the least amount of money, for you and for themselves. Meanwhile the $12/hr flunkie that takes 3 hours to replace a serpentine belt would make you rich. In a true flat-rate shop, the mechanic makes in hourly pay what the customer pays in hourly rates.
We use flat-rate labor times in the interest of fairness and consistency. For example, take something simple and common like a Honda Accord 4 cylinder timing belt/water pump replacement. I can perform that job in about half of the published labor time. Does that mean that because of my experience, tooling, and ability I should be paid less than someone doing the job for the first time and taking the full 5 hours? If I have a blinding migraine one day should I get paid more (and should the customer pay more) because the job took me longer to do?
Good points @asemaster. Let me explain a little more. In my way of thinking about a running a car repair shop – and remember I have absolutely no experience doing this, so best to take my ideas here with a grain of salt — the repair staff would be hired full time employees, work 40 hours a week, vacation and holiday paid time off, and paid a salary, irrespective of what repairs they actually did on a given day. The shop’s owner would bill the customers on an hourly rate, but the staff would be paid a fixed salary.
In the event the shop owner believed the staff employee took longer than he/she should have on repairing a particular customer’s car due to the employee having a migraine, or have to clean up due to a time consuming minor accident like dropping a bucket of oil on the floor, or simply that more training was needed for that particular employee, the shop owner could make an adjustment for that affected customer.
I’m thinking there are probably shops out there that do business this way. It seem like it would make the business environment friendlier.
The flat rate system is theoretically designed to promote getting the job done without lollygagging around and is pretty much in use everywhere.
However, the system is inherently evil, flawed, and the odds of it ever changing are not very good.
@asecular: This isn’t personal. I’m not making any argument for or against anything, nor do I run things this way. I’m just stating the simple facts of how much of the auto service industry operates. I see very little distinction between flat-rate and piecework. And I’m not making any of this up.
“No employee should expect to have input over suppliers.” No? Management sources a timing belt/water pump kit from the lowest bidder. 3 months later the water pump is leaking. You the tech now have to replace it again, doing a 4 hour job and not getting paid one cent to do it. Wouldn’t you stick your head in the office and say “hey guys, let’s try a different brand.”?
“Guess what, Boss? I’m exempt from WORKING over 40 hours a week.” I’m not sure what you’re saying here. To my knowledge there is no law on the books limiting a worker’s hours to 40 per week. But federal law is explicit in that it exempts dealership flatraters from overtime pay.
“No one cuts wages when they run a special.” Huh??? Happens all the time. When I worked flat rate I regularly saw labor times reduced in order to run a coupon or a special or to price match a quote from another shop.
“Tell me again how you give sample oil changes or sample auto repairs?” Free oil change with any service over $150. Complimentary Air Cond Check. Free Tire Rotation and Brake Inspection this Saturday Only! Read your Sunday paper or your Valpak coupons. They’re all over the place. And I’ll bet half of the techs doing those “sample” services aren’t getting paid for them.
“If there’s a Central office there are procedures in place to keep you from doing the things you are talking about doing. Sorry.” Correction–“Central Office” is the one that implements and enforces these policies. GM is now paying dealer techs .3 hours to diagnose Check Engine Light/Driveability complaints. That gives you 18 minutes to go find the car, drive it, get it in your stall, do whatever testing is appropriate and write up your ticket for the front counter. And you’ll make like $8 for that. National Tire Store Chain (let’s call them BurningRock) will pay you .8 hours to replace brake pads, clean and lube calipers, install new hardware and resurface rotors. They will also guarantee flat rate techs 30 hours pay per week, provided they are clocked in for the full 40.
“I know your shift is over in 15 minutes but I just sold 25 burgers and I need those right away. Again, I’ll start them, but the next person will finish them.” You may change your tune if you’ve been at work for 7 hours and only gotten paid for 3.
“You are such a bad employer I don’t care if I get paid for them, I just want to leave, and by the way, I’ve been stealing from you, largely because of this system.” Agreed, and it’s also true that many flat rate techs take on side jobs, often using parts and supplies from the shop. One shop owner saw the light, decided to give all the guys as many cans of brake cleaner as they wanted. After 3 months he noticed he was actually buying less, since no one saw the need to steal it anymore. On the other hand I had lunch with a shop owner who was bragging he found a guy desperate for work and is paying him $10/hr to rebuild transmissions. Oh, the profit!
"I don’t care. Not my problem. Doesn’t mean I wish them ill, but (puts up hands) fact of life."
That’s fine, and not too far from my opinion as well. But what many people don’t realize is that if the price they’re willing to pay for auto service isn’t high enough to allow for proper equipment and information for the shop, and enough wages for the mechanic that he can buy a decent house and take his kids to the beach once in a while, they are going to be disappointed with the quality of service they receive.
I was never a stellar flatrater, but made a decent living. But I got tired of having to game the system and pawn off lousy work on other guys to do it. So now I can exercise what little control I have and make sure no one here has to deal with all the crap above.
@asecular, you don’t understand how the system works. If you think that wages are not being cut or manipulated all the time then you would be dead wrong. It’s done by any one of a number of methods or a combination of many methods.
I don’t know what you do but let me point out an example and you tell me whether you would agree to having your wages handled this way.
A dealer I worked for started a team pay plan. Each mechanic’s flat hours were pooled for the month and the total divided by the number of mechanics. Even worse, the lot porter flunky who contributed no hours at all to the pool was also put on the plan.
This means that the mechanic who goofed off, called in sick every week, and so on got the same paycheck as the guy who was busting his tail all day long, day in and day out and the lot porter’s wages were being paid by the shop mechanics instead of his actual employer.
If a mechanic flagged 60 hours for the week and the slacker flagged 30 then each got paid for 45 hours is what it boiled down to.
So I ask; would this be acceptable to you?
I’ll add to that, ok4450. A local multi-line GM dealer instituted a team system like that, but with varying rates depending on hours flagged. Something like 20-30 hours was $15/hr, 30-40 was $18/hr, 40-50 was $22/hr and so on. All to encourage billing more hours. What an asinine system.
When one of these guys came looking for a job he couldn’t even tell me what he wanted for a straight hourly wage because he couldn’t figure out what he was making before. All he knew was that he felt he was being cheated.
@asecular, how would you suggest mechanics be paid?
Regarding piecework the point could be made there’s a difference involved.
Carpenter A may charge X dollars to homeowner B for a new deck.
Mechanic A will have obstacles between himself and car owner B with A having no control or say-so over it.
In the example I provided of the mechanics being screwed over I will say this. Mechanics are routinely screwed over all the time and this is especially true at the new car dealer level. The car manufacturers themselves are part of it; especially in regards to warranty repairs.
Also in that example, that plan did not last long after I found out that I was going to be helping to pay the wages of the lot porter who worked for the company; not me.
The boot that my foot was in connected with the chair the service manager was sitting in and that rolled him right into the wall.
I have a number of friends employed as professional mechanics so I have heard all this before and then some. By far the worst stories I heard were from dealership mechanics. How far up the bosses rear you have your nose also can determine the difference between getting the gravy jobs and the losers. This type of employment is kind of a gray area to me- it’s more like providing on site services as a contractor than being an employee. This is the type of worker abuse that brought on the unions so I was curious about that aspect. Sure enough, I found at least one professional auto mechanics’ union and shops that are listed as union shops. Maybe you professional mechanics need to get organized in order to stem the abuse…
@asecular, if you’re paying for any repair from an oil change to an engine swap or paint and body work then the pay schedule could include CBAP…
Could Be A Problem.
As distasteful as it is and I’m by no means condoning the practice, a mechanic having a bad day after getting screwed over for the 19th time that week may decide to take it out on the next customer through the door or even on the dealer if the mechanic is doing their used car work or Pre-Delivery Inspections.
The attitude will be that “well, they just shafted me out of yet another hour so the next one through the door is going to get corners cut” even though it is not ethically right.
I can just about guarantee you a fair percentage of those cut-rate dealer oil changes you see advertised on TV are not being done by the book. The oil may get changed, the tires may get rotated, and that 27 point inspection becomes a coin flip.
The customer may never be aware that the car has been pencil whipped and run out the door…
Just food for thought if you have your auto service done by others.
“I can just about guarantee you a fair percentage of those cut-rate dealer oil changes you see advertised on TV are not being done by the book”.
@ok4450–This is the reason I don’t like these “special deals” advertised on television and I don’t buy the services. I am a customer of an independent shop and the quality of the work is top notch. I don’t do my own work any more, but I would rather pay more for an oil change and have the technician do a good inspection than have a cut-rate dealer oil change and either have some corners cut or have the mechanics try to talk me into unnecessary repairs.
“I can just about guarantee you a fair percentage of those cut-rate dealer oil changes you see advertised on TV are not being done by the book”.
This is just common sense, and applies to anything in the world. Sure there are exceptions and dishonest people out there but in general you get what you pay for. I will never understand the mentality of the people who use a 2-for-1 dinner coupon, look for a $20 oil change, or use any kind of discount on a service and then complain about the level or quality of service.
I bet a lot of the people using coupons are trying you out for the first time. That is the worst possible time to give a sub-par performance. You’re virtually guaranteeing there won’t be any repeat business if you do that. And most customers don’t bother complaining to the business, they simply vote with their feet. You can bet they’re going to tell everyone they know or will listen how you suck so there’s a double whammy- you lost them and anyone else that they talk to. If you’re running a business and you are going to take the position that, hey you only paid this much for my service because I discounted it to get you in the door so I’ll take shortcuts or give you less than my best performance, I have a prediction about your future…
It’s not just the oil changes and inspections tied into it as that is a comparatively minor issue due to it all involving mechanical basics.
The real issue is when a mechanic gets repeatedly stiffed for warranty operations or a gutless service manager wants to screw the mechanic over because he or she doesn’t have the guts to tell a customer to take a hike even though the shop and mechanic has done no wrong at all.
Example. A mechanic who worked next to me a multi-line dealer was a great guy and very competent. Customer brings car in and authorizes a repair for X dollars. The repair was done promptly and correctly but afterwards the customer decides to raise hxxx about the price; obviously trying to weasel the price down after the fact.
The service manager backed down and refunded all labor to the customer as part of his pacification program. The customer left happy and the service manager then turned around and backflagged the mechanic his labor. This ticked the mechanic off to no end and he swore revenge.
I’m not sure what he did but I think that on a couple of dealer Pre-Delivery Inspections he checked the oil, the tire pressure, and ran them out the door; nothing more.
Is it fair that someone else suffers because of what someone else did? No. Just sayin’ that it happens and that it’s not as rare as one would think.
" the customer is always right" ???
No
The customer always wants something for free !