On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:39:07 -0800, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:

The issue is a question of what constitutes ethical treatment of the
customer.

Problems occur when the shop charges an hourly rate and runs into a problem
that doesn't quickly yield. I can fully understand -- and completely
sympathize with -- an experienced service tech who can't figure out how to
open a radio with no detectable closures, and a hard-to-find service manual,
even after an hour's work. * But I'm not going to pay an hour's labor for
the time it took to get it open, whether or not he successfully repaired the
radio.

I don't expect a service technician to be ominiscient. Neither do I expect
to pay for his training. When an item goes back repeatedly for the same
problem, the service shop should make some sort of accomodation. In the case
of the incompetent repair of your car, the shop should not have been charged
for labor after the second attempt. "Just company policy" or "that's the way
most garages work" are not valid excuses.

[Please don't take the following personally, because it isn't meant as such.
When I have a problem that isn't satisfactorially resolved, and get hit with
such a remark, I tell the company that I'm only interested in what I want,
and don't care the least about what they want, as businesses are not human
beings, and don't deserve any form of personal consideration. Of course, if
the business doesn't make a consistent profit, it will go out of business,
but what is right for the customer has to take precedence. Businesses have
to treat the customer as they would like to be treated, and find a way to do
it that is consistent with good fiscal practice.]

One of the most-popular Public Radio shows in the US is "Car Talk" with Tom
and Ray Magliazzi, MIT grads who run a service shop. They usually know what
they're talking about, but don't claim to know absolutely everything **
(though sometimes you think they do). Anyhow, last weekend a woman told
about how her brakes would gradually seize -- of their own accord! -- until
the car was undriveable. The shop made two or three attempts -- for which
she was charged parts and labor -- but could not fix the car. Tom & Ray
suggested that the problem was with the power-braking assist pump, which
will probably turn out to be correct. In this particular case, the shop
appears to have been grossly incompetent.

In the US, service shops -- of which there is a declining number -- usually
charge a flat fee (which varies among device types, depending on their
complexity and ease of servicing) to spread out the costs among the easy-
and hard-to-repair units. The customer knows ahead of time what the charge
will be, and can make a rational decision about the repair. As long as the
item is correctly repaired, the customer shouldn't have anything much to
complain about.

Perhaps you should consider switching to a flat-rate system, which would
largely eliminate the problem of deciding what to charge for a difficult
repair. You would probably make more money and have fewer unhappy customers.
And I'll bet you'll work more efficiently and with less mental frustration.

* I've had "simple" problems that I just couldn't figure out. One was a Sony
Walkman with a built-in mono speaker that would not switch to stereo when
headphones were plugged in. Despite having the official sercvice manual, two
hours of aggravating analysis, spread over several days, refused to unearth
the problem, and I tossed it.

** There's a show segment called "Stump the Chumps" (the reference is to
"Stump the Band"), in which someone they'd given advice to returns to reveal
whether it was correct. It usually was -- but not always.


Dear god, let's not bring click and clack into this! Then things would
get messy fast...