| Electronics > Repair |
| Charging by the hour is unfair! |
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| vk6zgo:
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. |
| vk6zgo:
--- Quote from: SteveThackery on July 03, 2024, 10:57:34 am --- --- 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? --- End quote --- 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. --- End quote --- 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. |
| CatalinaWOW:
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? |
| SteveThackery:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on July 03, 2024, 11:16:43 am ---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. --- End quote --- 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. |
| SteveThackery:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on July 03, 2024, 11:16:43 am ---You're apparently arguing that a service should always have the status of a good, but that's simply not how services work. --- End quote --- 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. |
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