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It is outrageous.
But here’s a thought or two for you…
My next door neighbour (who had the old manse that my house in built on the grounds of) sold up and moved to Spain as he said he couldn’t make a decent living over here. He was a heating engineer for Vokera although an independent. the minimum he would call to house for, even for the likes of D&G was £50 plus VAT, my question was: why are we worth any less than that? And that leads on to still more questions. We have the same costs in training, in fact more in some cases. The same costs in transport, fuel, public liability, office facilities and getting on the same costs for salaries, strange isn’t it?
Vokera charge £100 labour off the bat with parts on top.
Are these charges silly or are they realistic prices for in-home service?
Are we undervaluing ourselves?
K.
Yeah well had it not been for Trevor’s valiant efforts as well it would not have been fixed as quickly as it was as I was flapping a bit.
K.
Re: Recent Downtime
Okay we’ve changed the look and feel of the site a bit by going to a theme called “fisubsilversh” if you don’t see a funky modern looking clean design then go to “Your Account”, selec “Themes” and change it to that and all will become clear.
You then have new options, like adding buddies, who’s online status is reported to you and the option of a “quick reply” in the forums.
This is now the default layout and is optomised for a 1024×768 desktop resolution. If that just swept by you without registering ask and I’ll explain.
All the PM functions etc should now be back online. If there are any problems at all please let me know.
K.
I’d have no issue doing inspections at a reasonable and sensible figure, but the figures I have heard mentioned are just far to low to justify it IMHO. Plus I don’t have, nor intend to have, two to four guys free two or three days a week to go and do inspections.
Also, if I (personally for the business) was looking at collections or any transportation of applince it would involve investment in vans etc., which given the low returns on offer I couldn’t stand. The volatility of fuel pricing makes that even worse as you would most likely be tied to a pricing structure for some time, which is probably why anyone proposing this to transportation companies is having a problem.
My plan would just be to shove the buggers in the big machine eating machine, all of them! 😉 At least then they could recycle the “waste” products.
Of course that is just my opinion of it.
But having done similar stuff in the past I will offer one little nugget of advice for anyone thinking on embarking in this field, make sure you have good overalls, rigger gloves, a hard hat and access to a shower for afterwards. 🙄
K.
Yes, the WEEE Directive, not that I’ve read it as it doesn’t directly affect me and I have no need to be conversant with it, seems to be a bit dubious in places from what I’m told.
However, your understanding is the same as mine on it on the basics, but how will it actually work? Will the manufacturer pay directly for disposal or into a central European fund of some sort and then the money dispersed by government? How is it audited, I mean by that how many appliances are actually sold and how many are actually returned? How does everyone intend to balance the books so to speak?
Sorry if I seem a bit negative on this but I’ve listened to tales of woe from other industries on this as well and there to there seems much confusion and almost universal agreement that to test for WEEE will cost more, lots more, than is currently on the table. Experiments on a similar vein in another EU state, Germany, to try to reclaim browngoods failed miserably. The cost of reclamation exceeded the cost of new product as, to take something apart, involves either labour or huge tooling costs, possibly both. Neither brown or whitegoods industries (from a service point of view) can stand these costs.
I can tell you that going onto council tip sites to inspect and/or reclaim is a nightmare, you have to see it to believe it, I have. We tried it to reclaim refrigerant, it failed, they ended up just crushing them and releasing the gas to atmosphere because they couldn’t aford the reclamation costs. The kicker is, we weren’t making any money at it!
As for inspecting a load of appliances in one go, I can also from first hand experience tell you that unloading a 40 foot wagon of scrap appliance is about as much fun as having a hot needle placed in your eye. Done that too and not made money trying to rework applainces.
Then you have to consider, what are you going to do with the applainces that can be reworked? Who’s going to buy them? When you can buy a new fan oven with timer for £56 delivered to the UK including VAT and import taxes, what’s the point? Grades can be had even cheaper! A washer can easily be bought for under £100 these days, hell I can get a brand spanking new Fagor washer to my door for £125, just think what I could buy that for direct from factory!
So in a climate where you can buy a brand new appliance for less than the price of replacing a module in one, what’s the point of re-working them? Even shipping the things to South Africa or somwhere would cost more than they are worth.
I know that’s a kinda depressing view, but it’s fact.
K.
Re: WEEE Directive
hunnyhill wrote:Trouble is the larger part needs to be funded through New Deal or similar and I am struggling to get contacts in this area. If anyone has any i’d be pleased to hear from them.
Which was my point, that without funding from outside the industry it’s not going to happen.
Apparently the manufacturers seem quite complacent about the WEEE Directive for some reason, goodness knows why as it could have a large impact on their business.
At the end of the day, someone is going to have to pay to have all this done and I wonder where the money will come from.
K.
There’s a few Ted, but the primary one to contact is the OFT (Office Of Fair Trading) which can be found at:
They would then forward their findings generally to the Competions Commision which would take the decision on what action to take if a monopoly or complex monopoly was found to be in place.
K.
Basically, like many companies seeking employed engineers they are having buy them, pure and simple and some are going to deperate lengths to to do so. What I keep wondering is (particularly where it is a retailer) how long can they support the high salaries and seemingly wonderfull deals that they offer to potential staff given that the cost of the appliances they are servicing are dropping in real terms?
One day a different bean counter will arrive, realise the folly of the previous one and ditch the idea again. In the case of Comet, if my memory serves me correctly, they have done this twice already in teh past. Now that they are on their own and can no longer look to a helping hand (or handout) from Kingfisher Group plc, how long can they sustain a loss maker like service? Let’s face it, to make a profit in this game you either have to be very lucky or very skilled indeed with the money allowed for service.
In this case I have grave concerns over either luck or skill being good enough to sustain it. 🙄
The problem it gives us though as well as the others out there looking for engineers, is that it raises the bar on salaries, salaries that we simply cannot afford to pay in the current climate and, when the inevitable tumble does happen, the people that will be trying to screw us to the deck on price are often the very ones that raised the stakes in the first place by offerring silly salaries.
Irony, you have to love it.
K.
Well folks if you thought that Servis spares were expensive as they were, think again!
12{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} increase from December the 1st 2003
My opinion of it, horrific! Given that I priced a pump, motor, module, timer and inner drum for an M3022 yesterday and the total for spares alone was £443 incl VAT for a machine retailing for under £200!
Taking the Michael or what?
K.
You will see this morning I have added a block that scrolls the last few subjects posted to on the frontpage etc. It works like this:
Click on the subject to be taken straight to the new post
Click on the forum name to go straight to the forum
You can click on the user as well, just as you can in the forums
I like it! 😀
K.
Yep, I thought it was Caremark that had the dubious honor of being the first to try and shaft agents in this manner. Then you get dumped with 2 months notice and asked to submit invoices within 24 hours, not asking for much are they. 😕
At least two months is better than two days mind you. 😉
K.
Was this not the crew that were taking credit card payments from chargeable customers and then expecting the agents to do the call for a warranty labour fee? 🙁
K.
Thanks, I’ve updated it a bit now since I’ve had ten minutes peace.
Direct link:
http://www.ukwhitegoods.com/modules.php … age&pid=24
K.
Flipper wrote:I don’t pay sick pay, but we do have a gentlemans agreement with certain staff members who don’t take the ‘piss’ and who arn’t regular abusers.
We do and have done the same as it means that only the ones that are taking the proverbial are being punished and not the staff that you actually rate and do the job. To me it’s one of the ways to treat staff that a large corporation or even larger company cannot compete with and it does have a bearing on staff retention I’ve found as it is a benefit to them that they would not get elsewhere. But as flipper says, it has to be a gentelman’s argeeement otherwise it can be seen as unfair to some staff members and a damned good reason for letting your accountant do the wages and not someone in-house, learned that one the hard way. 😕
K.
