House of Horrors

[VillageIdiot2]

Re: House of Horrors

I agree Bryan, If we as Sole Traders, Small Companies or Manufacturers advise the customer of your charges before agreeing to book a job in, there is no rip off there. The terms / charges of the repairer have been aired and it is the choice of the customer to agree to them or shop around. I think the term ‘rip off’ can only come into the equation when low prices / no call out fee / free estimates are quoted then the cust gets a £100 bill!

[Martin]

Re: House of Horrors

I’ve had a bit of bovver with my ballcock don’t you know? It’s been trickling non-stop out my pipe now for over 4 weeks. 😥

My missus kept pestering me to call in a man to sort it, so I finally gave him a bell yesterday. He came out an hour or so later (at 6:30pm in fact) whipped out the old one, popped a new one in and also because the stop-cock was dodgy, replaced that as well. 🙂

Lovely job done in less than 30 minutes, how much?………..£42 cash in hand….I gave him £50 (‘cos I’m reckless with my money)….and everyone is happy. 8)

Now how much did those dodgy plumbers on House of Horrors charge I wonder?……Wasn’t 42 quid I know? :rolls:

[andy_art_trigg]

Re: House of Horrors

Bryan wrote:Not defending the manufacturers here but I guess the point in their favour is that presumably they’ve fully informed the customer of the £90 labour charge before booking the call.

I don’t really see that as ripping people off (when they already know the price) , well only in a round about way I suppose :rolls:.
It’s more of a take it or leave it situation.

Bryan

It’s just interesting that there’s a very different attitude to the exact same service provided by different people. On the one hand manufacturers can charge £90 for an (arguably) inferior service and potentially make many hundreds of thousands in profit out of repairs. However, a small firm or sole trader is “ripping people off” if they charge anything that ensures they too made a nice fat profit at the end of the year.

It’s almost as if as a sole trader or small business you are expected never to make proper profits – only survive. If a sole trader or small firm charges (say) £45 to do a repair and generally just scrapes by each year covering their costs that’s fine. But if they wanted to charge £80 and make a nice profit each year, that would be obscene to most of the public – and they would be accused of overcharging.

I’m arguing hypothetically here. It goes without saying that a sole trader would probably never get away with charging those prices but there just seems to be one rule for big companies who can make millions in profit (so they must be overcharging) and one for the rest.

[kwatt]

Re: House of Horrors

I can see what Andy and others are trying to say, to be succinct about it…

We charge £70 to change a set of Hotpoint carbs we’re regarded as expensive, possibly even a rip off.

Hotpoint charge £90 to do the same but the parts are “free” and that’s viewed as being okay.

What people often don’t understand is that, where we talk about fixed labour pricing, the labour is easily compared between companies but the spares aren’t as we get spanked up on a lot of them. Not a level playing field.

Also bad is where, as in the case of Miele, Indesit and a few others, there is absolutely no choice for the customer due to the restriction on either spares or technical information, often both. I consider that a monopoly situation.

K.

[iadom]

Re: House of Horrors

kwatt wrote:

We charge £70 to change a set of Hotpoint carbs we’re regarded as expensive, possibly even a rip off.

Hotpoint charge £90 to do the same but the parts are “free” and that’s viewed as being okay.

.

Is that £70.00 for the, fit in under 1 minute, buy for £2.95 genuine 1600474 carbons . 😯

With the best will in the world I cannot regard that as anything other than excessive. If it is for later WMA Bosch/FHP carbons then it is a little different but still on the high side.

Jim.

[Penguin45]

Re: House of Horrors

I’ve got a fella near me who did it for £85 last year – £73 and some pence call-out and “standard 1/2 hour labour” plus £12 for parts……….

Chris.

[kwatt]

Re: House of Horrors

That’s the point Jim.

What we charge, in theory, £70 is seen as expensive.

But it’s okay for Indesit to charge £90 and nobody thinks anything of it really, more than 20{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} more expensive overall on what we consider a high price from an indie.

So, let me ask another, if Hotpoint machines were 20{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} more expensive than Bosch or Lux (choose a brand) how do you think that would affect their sales?

My point in that instance is that what the customer doesn’t see on the ticket they don’t care about. In many ways the discussion about welded tanks in the subscribers forum is along the same lines, the customer can’t see the problem up front so, they don’t care. All they care about is it not being their problem and getting it sorted or replaced at a price that they think is fair.

We know it’s a rip off, getting that across to customers is a whole other ball game. 😕

K.

[kwatt]

Re: House of Horrors

Thinking about it and another thread…

Is popping out and selling the customer some descaler, then charging £90 to do so fair? Or even rejecting the call and selling such a product over the phone to “hopefully” cure the problem.

I’m mercenary in some ways with my repair business but I can sleep sound at night knowing we will NEVER do that, I’d pack it in first long before we ever stooped that low. 😉

K.

[Martin]

Re: House of Horrors

The House of Horrors is little about what price one charges for fitting Hotpoint brushes and more about cowboy practices that still proliferates this trade. 🙁

There are cowboys everywhere but fortunately these days the independent repairer (like the guy in Leicester) is in the extreme minority. The real cowboys are the manufacturers keeping their after sales servicing ‘in house’ with their often underhand dealings towards their customers on extended warranties and exhorbitant labour charges?

And wholesalers in freefall with their divergent pricing of spare parts, with many in direct collusion with the manufacturers…..and so far that lot are the seen by many as the good guys? 😕

Only a guy fitting a pump for £100 gets officially branded “a cowboy” by the Press and TV these days and put in the public eye. He was caught red-handed on CCTV and whilst in the process of selling a new machine to his customer spotted that he made an error, which he eventually admitted to anyway?

Likely as not though time is running out for the real cowboys. 😉

[iadom]

Re: House of Horrors

Martin wrote:

Likely as not though time is running out for the real cowboys. 😉

Could well be, when I first went solo 28 years ago there were around a dozen other local Indies, a couple of them were sound but the others all rogues of various degrees. There are only two or three round here now, one still a crook, who stitches customers up with a replacement Candy at every possible opportunity, charged £140.00 to fit an £80.00 analogue motor to a digital control machine etc. One of the others is a bit hit & miss technically but doesn’t seem to rip people off, the other business seems to be quite sound as well. The others have all long since gone.

Jim.

[andy_art_trigg]

Re: House of Horrors

Martin wrote:Likely as not though time is running out for the real cowboys. 😉

These programmes have been exposing cowboys for over 20 years. While ever customers resent paying proper money for a proper honest repairman they will always leave themselves open to being ripped off in the same way that greedy people are vulnerable to being scammed.

I suspect the main reason cowboys are in decline is because of economics. They suffer from the same problems as the legitimate repairers in that people won’t spend money on a washing machine repair any more because they are so cheap. In the programme being discussed the “cowboy” tried to sell a new machine. If it wasn’t a set up I suspect the customer may well not have given the go-ahead for the £100 + pump repair.

In the 80s and 90s cowboys in my area were rife. They charged sums like £120 – £150 for supposedly replacing the timer etc. but there are few customers left that would pay that any more because they know they can get a new one for £200. They won’t die off completely but I’m sure they aren’t the force they used to be.

[andy_art_trigg]

Re: House of Horrors

iadom wrote:
Is that £70.00 for the, fit in under 1 minute, buy for £2.95 genuine 1600474 carbons . 😯

With the best will in the world I cannot regard that as anything other than excessive.
Jim.

Exactly. You make my point Jim. Even we have a complex about it. If a small firm needs to charge those amounts to make proper profits why is that immoral? Even at those prices I seriously doubt K is rich. How come we all accept being ripped of for CDs for example, which must be vastly overpriced because just the people recording and writing it make millions and millions of £££’s not counting the record companies and everyone else. The word’s littered with examples where companies make billions out of us. In my book if a company makes millions of pounds surplus they must be seriously overcharging for the product.

Of course without those profits, most things would grind to a halt which is why communism doesn’t work but the washing machine manufacturers charge up to £90 labour. That pays for the engineers wage, van, all associated running costs going right up to the top, and then leaves a nice tidy sum for the company called profit. They must be charging up to double what they need to to cover all costs and the rest is profit. Small firms and especially sole traders doing repairs are not supposed to make profit. Society expects them to charge only what’s necessary to keep them trading and pay themselves a wage. Why?

[kwatt]

Re: House of Horrors

That was an example, not what we charge. 😉

Our charge would be £50 for labour, £9.95 for carbs then VAT. Total bill would be £70.45 inclusive but we do have fixed price labour charges so, by the same token, clearing out the fill chamber or replacing it on an integrated Smeg dishwasher that’s a pig to get out will cost just the same in labour. It’s a case of some you win, some you lose but at least the customer knows the labour content in advance for sure without any dubiety.

Over the years I have found it the most effective way to work.

K.

[iadom]

Re: House of Horrors

your losing out a little there K, current list price of 1600474 is £15.81 ex vat. 😉 😀

Jim.

[kwatt]

Yeah, I know but we don’t do many and it’s an easy job. It’s worth not overcharging just for the goodwill factor and we don’t do very many of them these days anyway.

K.

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