Electronics > Repair
Charging by the hour is unfair!
ftg:
--- Quote from: Smokey on July 02, 2024, 12:55:15 am ---seems like the standard is just to replace whole assemblies and not try to repair anything.
--- End quote ---
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.
SteveThackery:
--- Quote from: janoc on July 02, 2024, 10:00:13 pm ---
--- Quote from: SteveThackery on July 01, 2024, 08:50:24 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.
--- End quote ---
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.
--- End quote ---
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.
T3sl4co1l:
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
David_AVD:
--- Quote from: SteveThackery on July 03, 2024, 10:57:34 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.
--- End quote ---
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.
watchmaker:
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.
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