Author Topic: Charging by the hour is unfair!  (Read 12421 times)

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Offline fmashockie

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #25 on: July 01, 2024, 11:27:00 pm »
So I get OP's point about hourly being unfair.  Especially nowadays where with most PCBs (at least in my industry, biotech) there is no schematic available.  So a lot of time is spent tracing out the circuit/understanding it. 

But what is the current industry standard?  I am having a hard time finding concrete info on this.  Do most charge hourly or a fixed rate?  If so, what are those rates (on avg?)

I am looking to take on some private/independent work and I want to make affordable services, but still get paid in a way that reflects the services provided.  In this case, a very niche service where most just swap boards; boards that are very expensive brand new.
 
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Offline Smokey

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #26 on: July 02, 2024, 12:55:15 am »
...
But what is the current industry standard?
...

seems like the standard is just to replace whole assemblies and not try to repair anything. 
 
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Offline fmashockie

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #27 on: July 02, 2024, 01:09:08 am »
 :-DD :-DD Yes that seems to be the case!  Very much so in my industry. 
 
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Offline all_repair

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #28 on: July 02, 2024, 01:49:55 am »
Fair to who?   To the paying party, one cent more is one cent more unfair.  Each side has each cost concern.
More productive than judging on other people costing is to find a way to lower the cost of the work like:
1. Come back with much bigger volume, or some factors that can lower the cost of the repairer
2. Find a shop that is specialising on your type of item, if there is any.

Don't forget, the best value-add of a repair shop is to reduce downtime cost of operation.  When things are gettng cheaper and cheaper, and man-hour getting more and more expensive, the main calculation is the man-hour saving.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2024, 02:00:26 am by all_repair »
 
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Offline SteveThackeryTopic starter

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #29 on: July 02, 2024, 09:58:42 am »

[...] seems like the standard is just to replace whole assemblies and not try to repair anything.


Yep, totally. I used to work as an electronics technician repairing telecoms products. The products had several circuit boards and I would diagnose to component level and replace the faulty components. As time went by my employer decided it was cheaper just to replace the entire circuit board than pay for the component-level diagnosis. 

As the years went by the products became more and more integrated, less and less repairable, until nowadays it is often cheaper to replace the entire product than spend time opening it up, diagnosing, replacing, testing, closing.
 

Offline David_AVD

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #30 on: July 02, 2024, 11:33:20 am »
I charge an upfront fee for almost all items brought in for repair. Before booking it in and charging the fee however I'll advise the customer what the likely total could be as a range. The upfront fee is deducted from the total repair total.

If I highly suspect that it's not going to be a viable repair I'll just tell them right then and there. People who rip customers off won't last in business.

My customers know the minimum cost involved and are free not to proceed booking it in. We also discuss what limit I should keep in mind as I work on their item and contact them if things look like going off course. I do get the occasional customer take their item back without booking it in and I'm fine with that.

Occasionally I'll spend hours and some parts on an attempted repair only to call it quits. I still get my minimum fee and 99% of customers are totally fine with this. I've actually had a few customers offer some extra money at that point as they appreciated the efforts I made even though I couldn't fix their item.

Very occasionally I get someone ask for a free quote. I simply tell them that's not how I work and they go elsewhere. Well, I suspect they get the same answer everywhere else and end up complaining to their friends how unjust the world is.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2024, 11:52:55 am by David_AVD »
 
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Offline David_AVD

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #31 on: July 02, 2024, 11:50:29 am »
I don't do electronics repairs - I'm a horologist who does repairs clocks and watches.

Just out of interest, do you work from home or in a rented workshop? Also, what sort of money would you have invested in spare parts (on hand), tools, etc?
 
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Online CaptDon

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #32 on: July 02, 2024, 01:05:03 pm »
Please remember some customers try to fix it themselves and cause the item to often become un-repairable!!! My father had a Radio / T.V. repair shop for over 30 years. for about the last decade of his business he charged $25.00 up front as an estimate fee. If you decided to repair the item after getting the estimate the $25.00 was credited to the repair charge. Often the customer said don't bother fixing it and the shop got a "parts buggy" to harvest a good used C.R.T. or expensive transformer and other parts from. Dad often told a customer "With new parts a C.R.T. replacement and convergence will run around $150.00 to $180.00 but we have a good used C.R.T. available with a 1 year warranty and could do the job for around $90.00 These 'hard parts' often came from T.V.'s that had suffered lightning damage. As for an estimate, it is often the case that the item must be fully repaired and burned in for a day to make sure nothing else is wrong. So you now have parts and labor tied up and may only see the estimate fee. If the customer decided the repair was too costly and said "just keep it, don't fix it", well, it was already fixed so he would put the item up for sale usually for what was owed on the repair bill. He harvested tons of repair parts from "just keep it" microwave ovens. Some of the parts harvested were obsolete by the O.E.M. and unavailable but Dad could still do the repair when no one else could!!
Collector and repairer of vintage and not so vintage electronic gadgets and test equipment. What's the difference between a pizza and a musician? A pizza can feed a family of four!! Classically trained guitarist. Sound engineer.
 
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Offline m k

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #33 on: July 02, 2024, 01:49:51 pm »
I've also done stuff for company internals, there the main indicator was lead time.

Around y2k computer things were pretty easy, but things became old pretty fast.
After ATX mobos came the CPU box situation changed, and small companies were a bit lost with "constant" change.
Here things were also more expensive back then.

Industrial stuff is different.
So it's much of what kind of a customer is paying.
Individual or a company, and what kind of a company.
Here cost estimation for individual customers is mandatory.

Old saying is that the price is not the work but the know how.
It kicks back if you don't know.

Working slower has two sides, doing it too slow and not too fast.
It's that you never have time to do it right, but you always have time to fix it.
Advance-Aneng-Appa-AVO-Beckman-Danbridge-Data Tech-Fluke-General Radio-H. W. Sullivan-Heathkit-HP-Kaise-Kyoritsu-Leeds & Northrup-Mastech-OR-X-REO-Simpson-Sinclair-Tektronix-Tokyo Rikosha-Topward-Triplett-Tritron-YFE
(plus lesser brands from the work shop of the world)
 
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Offline m k

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #34 on: July 02, 2024, 07:23:38 pm »
For private electronics repairer, needed tools are not a major thing.

Average salary x2 for semi pro, other x2 if it's for living.
It's a bit high, "1/5 is yours" is one kind of a rule of thumb here.

E,
Last comma includes too much silent info.

Private who is selling mainly work hours from good location can quite easily change that 1/5 to 4/5.
But still, percentages wont pay bills.

Bigger circles may have a situation of 6th, 1/6 of work force is mainly elsewhere.
And overall 1/10 is not so business anymore.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2024, 09:03:17 am by m k »
Advance-Aneng-Appa-AVO-Beckman-Danbridge-Data Tech-Fluke-General Radio-H. W. Sullivan-Heathkit-HP-Kaise-Kyoritsu-Leeds & Northrup-Mastech-OR-X-REO-Simpson-Sinclair-Tektronix-Tokyo Rikosha-Topward-Triplett-Tritron-YFE
(plus lesser brands from the work shop of the world)
 
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Offline SteveThackeryTopic starter

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #35 on: July 02, 2024, 07:58:58 pm »
Just out of interest, do you work from home or in a rented workshop? Also, what sort of money would you have invested in spare parts (on hand), tools, etc?

I work from home now, like so many horologists.  The overhead of running a retail shop is just too high for the limited footfall, and an industrial unit is overkill.  I have a top-floor room which I use for horology as well as electronics.

I've been doing this for about 45 years so it's really difficult to know how much I've invested in tools, etc, but it will probably be several thousand UK pounds.  As for my stock of spares and components, I've run that down a lot because it just wasn't worth keeping components that might sit for years or even decades before being needed.  My new approach is to keep a much smaller stock and order my stuff as required from Cousins, here in the UK.  Because they service vast numbers of customers they can afford to keep a large stock on hand.
 

Offline janoc

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #36 on: July 02, 2024, 10:00:13 pm »

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.

Of course it is an extreme example - but you didn't say what is the thing we are repairing, did you? For a complex piece of electronics with a complicated fault and possibly some restoration to be done as well (or equipment that is not easy to test), 20 hours could well be on the short side still! 

Don't assume that everyone is swapping cracked displays in smartphones in a shopping mall where it is +/- the same job every time a customer turns up with a smashed screen. There you can use those averages. 

But if pretty much every job you get is different (different device, different fault, different manufacturer, maybe parts/documentation not available, etc.) then you would be out of business pretty fast with that approach. How do you calculate an average rate from a sample size of one? That fixing a device A from a vendor X last week took 2 hours has zero bearing on how long will it take to fix an outwardly similar fault in a device B from a manufacturer Y because the root cause could well be totally different.


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.

That has been addressed - and it is a complete red herring. You are assuming the shop works in a vacuum and there are no other factors, such as competition, reputation, etc. You can rip a customer off with a slow, overpriced and incompetent repair exactly once. And if you do, you can be sure they aren't coming back with another job for you. Even better - they will for sure tell all their friends and post on all social media and wherever one posts reviews today what an incompetent crooked fool you are. Trust me, you are going to be out of business very fast. All it takes is a few poor reviews e.g. on Google Maps or Trustpilot (or whatever other such platform people use these days) and you suddenly have no work anymore.

That's the same sort of fallacious argument like people who claim you have ripped them off because you have charged $100 to replace a part that they can get for $1 on Amazon. They also ignore that the costs are not only the costs of the parts - like you ignore that when you charge by hour you can't arbitrarily pad your billed hours because the customer isn't an idiot that would agree to a completely open-ended contract with no bounds on the billed time. Or that the customer has no notion of value for their money and can't decide when it makes no more sense for them pay for the repair.

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.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with whether you charge by hour or a fixed sum. And if you do rip people off, you better have a good lawyer - you will need them pretty soon. Again, you are assuming that people are idiots and will put up with your shenanigans. If you want to rip people off like this with impunity, you need to be a banker or a stock broker, not a repairman where your entire livelihood hangs on your reputation.

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.

Of course there isn't a perfect answer to this - it depends on what kind of market you are in, what exactly you are doing, what are your customers willing to pay for the work, what your expenses are, etc. There is no one size fits all solution. Horses for courses and all that.

It is a tricky problem to get right - if you charge too little, you are leaving money on the table. If you charge too much, you are losing business. If you set up the billing scheme wrong, you will lose money and go out of business. There are entire economic theories on how to set price and bill customers. PhDs were obtained on this topic.

However, you do need to stop inventing non-existing problems and unrealistic scenarios that conveniently ignore inconvenient facts such as existence of reputation or competition in order to make your point. That's not a constructive debate. That's just trying to railroad the discussion in a direction that supports whatever arbitrary point you want to make. When dealing with livestock we could also assume spherical cows in a vacuum for convenience - but it won't help us any if one is trying to figure out how to milk them.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2024, 10:15:13 pm by janoc »
 
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Offline David_AVD

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #37 on: July 02, 2024, 10:25:23 pm »
Running a business from a retail / commercial premises costs a way more money than a lot of people realise. The rent in shopping centres can be astronomical and even smaller industrial spaces are expensive. I know, as I used to rent one after moving my business out of home (I bought a commercial space some time ago). A larger business with employees can be a better fit for commercial premises. Luckily these days the internet has made it a lot easier to find services that are not in those prime retail locations, although I do get a fair number of referrals from current customers and other related businesses.

A good stock of spare parts for electronics can cost quite a bit, especially if you need to be able to turn repairs around promptly. I would estimate that to be in the AUD $10K - $50K range depending on the type of electronics you work on. You can absolutely start a new business with a lot less than that, but over time you'll end up with a lot more.

I don't know that comparing the electronics and automotive repair industries is valid. Mechanics tend to see a lot more of the same vehicle models, where as a general electronics repairer I see a lot of quite different items each week. Service data can also be a big problem, whereas information on cars tend to be more readily available. Working without this information can certainly add time to a job.

If I take my car in to have some issue looked at and I don't go ahead with the suggested repairs, I fully expect to pay for the diagnostic time. Why should anyone work for free? If a business wants to offer free quotes I'm not offended, but I don't feel the need to do the same. Of course some business types do need the free quote offer, but they are for purchases like carpets, patios and the like, not diagnostics.
 
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Offline Runco990

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #38 on: July 03, 2024, 01:14:24 am »
To the OP with love....  :-*

Learn to fix your own stuff!   :-+  Problem solved!   :-+

Note:  I AM a certified Master Electronics Technician, so take what I say as you wish.

I repair test equipment and do tape decks as well.  Mostly as a hobby now.  I am really semi-retired and do this out of my paid off house.

But I MUST charge a 1 hour diagnostic fee because I have to take apart a complex machine to try and figure out what's wrong with it, and what in most cases... someone else has DONE to it.  This takes time and work.  Frequently much more than one hour.  I have been in decks a DAY before figuring out everything, as often it is more than one problem.  USUALLY it is more than 2 or 3.  That is the nature of old gear.  Now on modern stuff.... you just swap a board.  You don't really troubleshoot it, but at the same time it wasn't even meant to be repaired in the first place.  Those are the "modern" shops, that still exist.  This is not the type of work that I do.  I do component level troubleshooting. 

I CANNOT give up front estimates because I usually get hammered, clapped out, already tinkered with gear that now requires a MIRACLE to get running again.  I am often "The Tech of last resort".  By then, the customer is looking for CHEAP, as some "shop" already charged them and didn't fix a thing.  It's like this:  "My car is making a knocking noise, how much to fix?"  Well, without seeing it, how can I know over an email if something is loose or it's a rod knock and the engine is going out?   But sure... let me quote you $250 to fix.

There are times that when a job gets beyond reasonable expectation, I often just do a flat rate that works for me and the customer, as things are sometimes hidden and only come out later, but I am now much too deep into it and cannot just "UN-DO" my work and say sorry... I'm bailing on this one.  I actually DO work with people.  I do get it.

In my world, there is no "No fix, No pay"    YOU go do it!  You'll be out of business in no time if you work on ancient crap like reel to reel decks.  The effort needed to just diagnose, let alone properly align an electro-mechanical device this complex makes this impossible.  If that is what you want from ME.... good luck getting your thing repaired.  I work from home, so my rates are reasonable, but no.... I don't and CAN'T work for free.  Also, I'm actually very good at what I do... so the NO FIX is pretty damn rare.  I fix stuff others gave up on.

Especially now, that many ebay flippers are just looking for a "cheap fix" so THEY can cash in big time.  I have worked for a few....  "Can you fix this Studer A810 for $20?"  NO... I cannot.  It costs an hour to diagnose, then you get an estimate.  And that is what it is... an ESTIMATE.  Sometimes, things go south... it happens... and you have to make that unpleasant phone call.

And if you think that a good tech pads out his hourly rates.... think again.  We usually have more work than time and usually a weeks to MONTHS backlog.  In fact, I only do specific jobs and interview potential customers ahead of time.  Yes, some shops do this... I don't agree with it.  I do this because I LIKE what I do, not screw people over, so I understand the concern.  Find a better shop.  I always advise to find a private tech instead of a shop, as usually you will have a much better experience.  Most of us old fools do this because we WANT to, not because we HAVE to.  But groceries ain't free....

And then there are many jobs that are simply not worth taking, as parts and labor are constant, the value of the item IS NOT!  It costs a minimum of $40 to replace a belt in a $20 DVD player.....  just toss it and get another.  OR... learn to fix it yourself.  So I myself do not touch "cheap stuff". 
Yes, I was asked this on a coby dvd player.... the girl was SHOCKED that I couldn't do it for $5!

Cheers!  ^-^
 
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Offline David_AVD

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #39 on: July 03, 2024, 02:52:10 am »
I get a few calls a day from people asking if their item is worth bringing in for repair. I spend 2 mins to ask them a few questions about the item and the fault, then give them my best guess. I stress that I can't know for sure without investigating the fault properly and there is a risk of wasted money (for them) if I do end up finding that the repair is not viable. It's their call and I don't try and talk them into bringing the item in.

Sometimes they will bring the item in and pay the upfront fee, only for me to find the actual issue is worse or not what I thought it may have been. Does that suck for them? I guess so, but I don't have a crystal ball so it's really not my problem. The key is not to sugar coat the initial guess. Just be honest. There's a reason I have a near perfect rating on Google and new customers often remark on it.

Of course there's the people that want their $59 Bluetooth speaker repaired and think it will cost $20 because "It's just a simple fault. It won't turn on so must be the power switch." Sigh...

I concur with the previous poster about stuff that's been "fiddled" with. Sometimes the customer will never even mention they've had a go. It can cause the job to take a lot more time as you've then got to check things that they may have damaged in the process.
 
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Offline ftg

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #40 on: July 03, 2024, 08:21:16 am »
seems like the standard is just to replace whole assemblies and not try to repair anything.

Can't really afford to.

Back when I was working in a TV repair shop only known and documented component level fixes would be done.
As you usually could not make a profit on the repair if you had to do any component level diagnosis.
Even when you had the schematics from the manufacturer.

When a new PSU is 15eur, you don't diagnose it.
Unless it's some documented and known fault like blown diodes that don't take anything else with them.
Then you might fix it, if you have no spares on the shelf.

But when you can bill 75eur + cost of spares, you don't get to trace out a fault.

I think the cheapest assembly where component level repairs were done was swapping blown fuses and ferritebeads on TV backlight drivers in few models.
Those were 8eur and 4.5eur assemblies, but we rarely had them in stock and they had longer lead times.
So swapping the two 3A SMD fuses was quick and cheap, as you did not even have to remove the boards.
But those were a rare special cases.
 
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Offline SteveThackeryTopic starter

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #41 on: July 03, 2024, 10:57:34 am »
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.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with whether you charge by hour or a fixed sum. And if you do rip people off, you better have a good lawyer - you will need them pretty soon. Again, you are assuming that people are idiots and will put up with your shenanigans. If you want to rip people off like this with impunity, you need to be a banker or a stock broker, not a repairman where your entire livelihood hangs on your reputation.

And yet again you ignore the point.  I'll have one more go.  If you aren't competent enough to find and fix the fault, why should you still get your $200 per hour reward?  Can't you see how wrong that is?  What other business rewards incompetence and failure as generously as competence and success?  That is why it is so wrong to send the customer home with a still-broken appliance and a few hundred bucks less in their wallet.

A light-hearted analogy would be to walk into a shop and ask for a can of tomato soup.  The proprietor says "I'm sorry, we're out of stock.  That'll be $1.20 please."

It seems like you cannot put yourself in the customer's shoes, even for a moment.  But try, please. 

And one last time: if you aren't smart enough to fix my appliance, why the heck do you expect me to pay you? If you aren't smart enough, your time is worth nothing.  No fix/no fee is a moral imperative.
 

Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #42 on: July 03, 2024, 11:16:43 am »
What's your point?  You pay for goods received.  You pay for services rendered.  Services and goods have different legal status and with good reason.  A service might not produce an intended outcome, but neither might it be guaranteed to.  The service contract is whatever the service contract, either says it is, was verbally agreed, or otherwise implied to.

You're apparently arguing that a service should always have the status of a good, but that's simply not how services work.

Making a moral case for it, depends on the moral framework it is derived from. One could equally well argue that, hey I put in however many hours doing the thing, work is work, pay me.  You've constructed no argument from moral principles (which framework, even!), you've just asserted that you think it is so.

Tim
« Last Edit: July 03, 2024, 11:19:01 am by T3sl4co1l »
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Offline David_AVD

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #43 on: July 03, 2024, 11:48:35 am »
And one last time: if you aren't smart enough to fix my appliance, why the heck do you expect me to pay you? If you aren't smart enough, your time is worth nothing.  No fix/no fee is a moral imperative.

You seem fixated on one possible reason for the non repair. In my experience the most common reasons for an item not being repaired are that it won't be economically viable (too many hours and / or parts required), or that the part(s) required are simply no longer available. Both are very real problems that service technicians face all the time and often you can't possibly know this outcome until you've spent a fair chunk of time on that job.

I'm sure that there are some repairers that take on work far beyond their abilities, but if they continue to do so word will get around very quickly and business will dry up for them. I've had a few instances in the last 30 odd years where I've accepted a repair only to realise that I either didn't know enough to do the job or I could foresee the train wreck it would become due to the combination of customer and item / fault. In those cases I did no work on the item and refunded the upfront fee. Some of them were referred to other repairers with more specialist knowledge in the item concerned.

The "no fix = no fee" entitlement bullshit needs to die. If a business wants to offer it, good luck to them. I know a lot of electronics repairers and none of them operate this way. If you want me to use my skills and work on your equipment, you need to pay for it.
 
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Offline watchmaker

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #44 on: July 03, 2024, 01:37:16 pm »
My timepiece business is/was entirely via mail/ups.  Domestic and international.  My niche cannot be sustained by local/regional work.

My basic service charges are posted on my website.  But I gave a complete quote (which included needed parts and significant corrections) after inspection.  If the customer refused the service, all I charge is the cost of return shipping.  I also pay return shipping when I determine a return is my fault and I provide a one year warranty on actual performance.  Nothing worse than making a pilot/owner pull a clock from the instrument panel because I screwed up.

The reason is my business model is mail order.  I cannot see the piece with the customer at the front counter.  I cannot remember a time when the customer declined.  Of course, this means I likely am way underpriced.  But my website is over 20 years old and created with Front Page and was last updated maybe 3 years ago.  I hate working on it.  Surprisingly, those who come to me actually like the home made feel of the site.  Self selection I guess.

Mary insists we work on it together before September.

Just my advice to all those who offer repair service:  do NOT compete on price.  Compete on service.  Let everyone else run in the race to the bottom.  At least in timepieces, it seems the higher your charges, the better the work you get.  For one thing, educated and successful people know what good work costs.
Regards,

Dewey
 
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Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #45 on: July 03, 2024, 01:58:09 pm »
The thing is, whether you charge a set price per job, or charge by the hour, somebody will think you are "ripping them off".

Back when I worked at the TV Studio, we had a programme which purported to investigate if customers were being ripped off by TV repairers.

Instead of consulting the large numbers of experienced Techs & EEs in the Network, the Producers hired an outside engineer, with
"a pretty high opinion of himself" to put a fault on a TV, & see how long the repairers took to fix it.

He tweaked a trimpot, producing a reduction in picture height.
The TV service companies all took some time to return the TV, with the problem fixed.

The EE then trumpeted forth how it had "taken them so long to find a misadjusted pot".

The general feeling amongst us Station Techs was that he was a Twat, as any Tech "worth their salt", would not consider "twiddling a pot" to be fixing something, & would look for a real intermittent fault, obviously incurring manhours.
 
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Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #46 on: July 03, 2024, 02:29:01 pm »
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.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with whether you charge by hour or a fixed sum. And if you do rip people off, you better have a good lawyer - you will need them pretty soon. Again, you are assuming that people are idiots and will put up with your shenanigans. If you want to rip people off like this with impunity, you need to be a banker or a stock broker, not a repairman where your entire livelihood hangs on your reputation.

And yet again you ignore the point.  I'll have one more go.  If you aren't competent enough to find and fix the fault, why should you still get your $200 per hour reward?  Can't you see how wrong that is?  What other business rewards incompetence and failure as generously as competence and success?

Incompetent CEOs regularly leave their jobs with a "golden handshake", on top of the bonuses they have accrued over the years of destroying the business
Quote

That is why it is so wrong to send the customer home with a still-broken appliance and a few hundred bucks less in their wallet.

A light-hearted analogy would be to walk into a shop and ask for a can of tomato soup.  The proprietor says "I'm sorry, we're out of stock.  That'll be $1.20 please."

And one last time: if you aren't smart enough to fix my appliance, why the heck do you expect me to pay you? If you aren't smart enough, your time is worth nothing.  No fix/no fee is a moral imperative.

If the time spent trying to fix your appliance is time that could be spent fixing some other piece of equipment from a customer who accepts the conditions, your business is not worth having, so you can go elsewhere with no financial penalty to either party.

The obvious point also arises, that sometimes, businesses have a fixed non-refundable charge. This may well exceed the cost of just paying for man-hours for an easy job.
 
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #47 on: July 03, 2024, 02:47:33 pm »
I would suggest that watch repair is a bad comparison to electronics repair.  It seems that parts for watches can either be purchased or fabricated relatively easily.  For electronics many parts are literally impossible to replace.  Vacuum tubes may or may not be available, and many custom ICs cannot be found.  While an experienced tech recognize the likelihood of this problem in a particular device, is the labor to verify that no repairable fault exists to be free?
 
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Offline SteveThackeryTopic starter

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #48 on: July 03, 2024, 03:13:09 pm »
One could equally well argue that, hey I put in however many hours doing the thing, work is work, pay me.  You've constructed no argument from moral principles (which framework, even!), you've just asserted that you think it is so.

I've already explained this: no customer wants to buy your time or your work, they want to buy a repair.  The customer doesn't need to know or care how much time it took you - they go away with a repaired appliance or they don't.
 

Offline SteveThackeryTopic starter

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Re: Charging by the hour is unfair!
« Reply #49 on: July 03, 2024, 03:17:38 pm »
You're apparently arguing that a service should always have the status of a good, but that's simply not how services work.

No I'm not. I'm arguing that a customer never wants to buy your time, because it is intangible and useless to them. They want to buy a repair.  That is a service, not a good.

What they NEVER want to buy is a "nothing". $200 for a non-repair.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2024, 03:32:21 pm by SteveThackery »
 


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