| Electronics > Repair |
| Charging by the hour is unfair! |
| << < (5/40) > >> |
| woody:
--- Quote from: SteveThackery on July 01, 2024, 04:53:22 pm ---Electronics repairers could do what I do for trade clock repairs: just charge a fixed price regardless of the actual fault, and make sure that fixed price is high enough to generate the required income. Oh, and of course it has to be no fix/no fee - that is only fair. --- End quote --- Yeah, I could. Only the wildly varying stuff I get on my desk, usually without any schematic, makes that I won't. Sometimes a repair literally costs me two minutes and some solder but other times it costs me hours of tinkering and multiple orders at Farnell et al. It might be that a clock is a clock and repair often looks the same but this is not the case with the things I get my hands on. The farthest I will go is no cure no pay, where my experience (hopefully) tells me when to stop trying to breathe life into a device that has emitted its final magic smoke. And if I fix something hours are billed. If I get similar hardware with the same problem I set a fixed price. Which has not necessarily a relation to the number of hours I then spend on the thing. This means I never have to replace a blown diode in a dime a dozen wall wart for next to nothing but I do replace the same diode in a specialist joystick for the price of a decent smartphone. It works for me and it seems to work for my clients. |
| Sensorcat:
--- Quote from: Haenk on July 01, 2024, 11:00:52 am ---In automotive repairs (manufacturers workshops), there are fixed repair costs. Every possible repair has a standardized repair time, timed in minutes or fractions of an hour, resulting in standardized repair costs. So it is in the best interest of the workshop, to have their mechanics well trained and acting fast. If a 2 hour job is done in 1:45 that's free 15 minutes of working time for the shop (the mechanic probably gets a bonus for working faster than expected). --- End quote --- That's true, but it implies that diagnosis is not a big issue. If it is, the usual procedure of all workshops, even the manufacturers', is to replace parts until the problem is fixed. The customer pays for all tries and all parts in this case. |
| SteveThackery:
--- Quote from: janoc on July 01, 2024, 05:20:38 pm --- Sure they could. Then you would receive a 4 figures quote for everything because when you turn up with an (to me) unknown device at my desk, I can't know if that fault will take 20 minutes or 20 hours of work to fix. Or you will get a quote for e.g. 2 hours of work - and if it can't be fixed in those 2 hours, too bad for you. Either it won't be fixed and you get your device still broken back - or you will have to pay more for me to continue working on it. It is only fair. I am not a charity but a business. My bills won't pay themselves only because you think it isn't fair. --- End quote --- Fair comment, but I think you are choosing extreme examples to make your point. You definitely wouldn't (and I don't) quote a four-figure number for every job, just because it MIGHT take 20 hours. The reality is that 20-hour repairs are extremely rare. So are 2 minutes repairs. You work on averages, such that most weeks you make the right money, occasionally a bit more, occasionally a bit less. --- Quote from: janoc on July 01, 2024, 05:20:38 pm --- Fixed price works only when the scope of the work is well known ahead of time - such as for those auto mechanics when doing standardized repairs. When a customer comes asking for a tire swap or oil change, you know how much effort is that normally going to be, so it is easy to give a fixed quote. But even there you typically pay an hourly rate + cost of parts and consumables (oil, etc.), just the time how long the task should take is often prescribed by the manufacturer of the vehicle. If the problem is open ended and has to be identified first (which most electronic repairs are), good luck. But feel free to open an electronics repair shop working with fixed prices if you think this is economically workable. :-// --- End quote --- Yes, I agree with that. Using myself as an example, clocks and watches have far fewer failure modes than electronics. My aim was to point to a different business model which (arguably) seems fairer to the customer. So far nobody has addressed the three fundamental problems with charging by the hour. 1/ It encourages you to work slowly in order to charge the customer more money.* 2/ The less competent the repairer the more money they charge per job because it takes them longer. This is the wrong way round. 3/ There's a mismatch between what the customer wants to buy (a repair) and what you are willing to sell (your time). And that's what leads to the most unfair practice of all: charging a customer a goodly sum and sending them home with an appliance that's still broken. There's an expression for that: a rip-off. Or maybe daylight robbery. You get the idea. (*) Let's be honest, we've all eked out a job, even if only semi-deliberately. It's 4.30pm, it's been a long day, and you don't want to start the next job so late in the day. So you fiddle about doing some gentle make-work - resoldering all the soldered joints, pushing a cloth behind all the buttons to clean the dust out, etc - anything nice and easy to take you up to 5pm. And of course you charge the customer to 5pm, even though they've bought half an hour of make-work. Personally I don't know the answer. In fact I don't believe there is a single answer to the fundamental conflict: the customer wants to buy a repair, you want to sell your time. There are only compromises. Whatever charging model you use, the one line in the sand I believe we should all observe is: no fix/no fee. It's just not right morally to charge the customer $200, thank you very much, and send them home with a still broken appliance. It's just so colossally unfair to them, and they have absolutely no redress. If you aren't competent enough to fix the appliance, you should not be rewarded for failing. What other business rewards incompetence and failure? |
| starphot:
I'm a retired electronics repair tech. I've been out of the repair business for quite awhile. My shop was for a Fortune 500 electronics retailer and we had fixed repair rates depending on item with about a dozen brands under approved warranty service. I was on commission and I repaired over 32,000 analog cellphones and accessories plus other RF comm gear in my career. I made plenty as some units took only minutes until I was laid off in 2001. Depending on volume of repair unis doing the fixed rates vs hourly has its own advantages. Low volume repairs usually do the hourly in an independent shop, but don't abuse the hourly if you want referrals from your customers! |
| shabaz:
If someone is getting $200 bills unexpectedly, then that's a contractual problem, or the product to be repaired was taken to an unreputable place, or, perhaps, the customer did not look at the contractual terms or chose to ignore them anyway (non-expert customers might misunderstand how difficult a diagnosis or repair task may be). It's not possible to force someone to find the root cause within a couple of hours, or to repair something within a certain timeframe, because, very practically, it might not be possible or economically viable for the engineer to achieve it. That's why the world works with contract terms. One gets to decide if they are willing to proceed based on the contract, and if either side feels they didn't get what was contracted for, then there are practical solutions for that (like courts). It's moral to charge a 'reasonable amount' for spending time diagnosing an issue, and it's very moral for engineers to let their customers know at some point if it's looking like it might not be possible to repair, so that the customer can make the decision if they wish to spend more money proceeding further, or not. Regarding deliberately working slower when you know you're getting paid by the hour, this is not normal, but I can imagine some firms might have the odd engineer like that, bad company culture, etc. Hopefully they don't last long due to word of mouth, trustpilot type sites, etc. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |