"PeterD" wrote in message
...
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...

As it happens, I do charge a flat rate to the trade, and most of the stores
that I deal with do similarly to the customer who brings the item in, the
actual amount being dependant on what exactly the item is. My flat rate
includes parts to a value of 5GBP, which covers general transistors, diodes,
resistors etc. If the cost of parts (or occasionally labour) is going to
exceed that, I contact the store which took it in, and give them a quote.
Sometimes, knowing the customer, or based on indications of what he said he
was prepared to pay when the job was booked in, the store owner can give me
a go-ahead there and then. Sometimes, they have to contact the customer to
get a go ahead. In general, it's a good system, and everyone pretty much
knows where they stand from the outset. From my point of view, it allows a
degree of 'some ya win, some ya lose' flexibility to be automatically built
into jobs from any particular store. However, I don't treat it as a
catch-all that can be applied absolutely rigidly to all jobs. Yes, I am
prepared to lose sometimes against making at others, but it still has to be
based around a basic one hour figure, if the losses are not to exceed the
gains. There are very few 'stock faults' these days, which means that more
and more, every fault has to be 'chased down' which takes you on average,
ever closer to that one hour figure, and not making a reasonable profit
overall.

For that reason, if no other, I will continue to charge in the way that I
always have. It has never caused me a problem in the past, and I don't
envisage that it will in the future. There will always be people who do not
approve of a particular business practice or pricing regime, but as long as
it is leagal, and the majority don't have a problem with it, then any issues
that the minority might have, I see as their problem, not mine. Anyway, none
of this debate, interesting as it is, gets me any closer to resolving the
primary problem, so no more, please ....

Arfa