| Electronics > Repair |
| Charging by the hour is unfair! |
| << < (11/40) > >> |
| SteveThackery:
--- Quote from: David_AVD on July 03, 2024, 11:48:35 am ---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. --- End quote --- And yet in the previous para you describe doing that very thing: no fix, no fee. No fix, no fee isn't bullshit, and it's not about "entitlement". You said: "If you want me to use my skills and work on your equipment, you need to pay for it." I simply cannot believe this! Here we go again. As a customer I want a repair. I don't care HOW you achieve that. I don't care whether you you use your skills or not. Feel free to "poke and hope" if that's all that's needed. I don't care whether you "work on my equipment" or your dog does it. If you can see the fix in five seconds flat, then good for you. Once again it seems you cannot see the difference between what you want to sell (your time, or your skills) and what the customer wants to buy. The customer doesn't want to buy your skills and work, they want to buy a repair. I find it quite extraordinary that I'm still having to explain this. I have already agreed that there are various legitimate businesses models for how to charge the customer. The only point I will not budge on is the practice of failing to give the customer what they want and still charging them for it. That simply IS a rip-off. |
| watchmaker:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW 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? --- End quote --- I said precisely this in my first post. However, the principles of small business apply. Find a niche, limit the universe of devices you repair (the days of Lloyd's Fix It shop are done) and compete on service. TV repair was probably the closest analog to timepeice repair. Just carry around a box of tubes. Overall, as I tell young watchmakers, charge to be fair to yourself. If a gas lawnmower or chainsaw repairman makes more than you, change businesses. Pulling parts off a shelf for an item of no historical importance, or draining oil is a lot different from knowing how to handle complicated (chronograph), expensive or uncommon timepieces. Plus the liability if things go south. So if a lawnmower is charged at $45 an hour, what should be the charge for servicing timepieces? The same with electronics service work. A lot of education, tooling up, experience and knowing where to get replacement parts. FWIW, my customers tend to be grateful, not feeling ripped off. Part of it is qualifying the customer ("I am sorry, but I cannot serve you") and part of it is competing on service and not price. In fact, they put up with me not working during the summer, waiting several months to send it in and then waiting a couple of months until it comes up, the service is performed and then 1 to 2 weeks to verify performance. I did have several customers try to renege on their payment. Small claims court took care of all but one. The last was a restoration hangar. I simply noted his business in Quickbooks and sure enough, three years later he sent another clock. I billed him for the accrued interest on the first clock. He told me to keep the clock he sent. Tasty. That was the only time I broke my policy of payment before shipment. No invoices since. At some point in every business transaction, one person holds both the money and the goods. Business does not work without trust. I just trust my character above others. |
| SteveThackery:
--- Quote from: David_AVD on July 03, 2024, 11:48:35 am ---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. --- End quote --- So far this is the best argument put forward in this debate. In some fields this is a completely real issue: parts not available, or so many needed it would cost too much. I think there are two obvious approaches here. Firstly, you could explain the situation to the customer, return the item and eat the cost. More realistically, you could have a policy of evaluating each job when it comes in for viability, and explain to the customer that this initial evaluation will cost $50 (say) regardless of the outcome. That is fine because you and the customer have AGREED UP FRONT that they will have to pay $50 and there is a risk attached to it. The customer is fully informed. They can go ahead, knowing they might spend $50 and have nothing to show, or they can decide it's not worth the risk. There is nothing morally wrong about that. A nice little variant on that system is to say to the customer, "If you decide to go ahead I will knock the $50 off your final bill". I've seen that a lot and it certainly buys a lot of goodwill. How you actually arrange that is a matter for your discretion. :) This is fundamentally different morally from taking on the job, failing at it, and still charging them. That is what cannot be justified morally. --- Quote from: David_AVD on July 03, 2024, 11:48:35 am ---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. --- End quote --- Excellent! Good for you - you did exactly what I'm arguing for: no fix, no fee. |
| jonpaul:
ask any lawyer how he charges.... |
| T3sl4co1l:
--- Quote from: SteveThackery on July 03, 2024, 03:17:38 pm --- --- 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. --- End quote --- You are mistaken -- I've seen plenty of people pay money for intangible and useless services! Repeatedly and voluntarily! Maybe your perspective is biased by your experience in a niche market. I would perhaps be surprised -- but also would not rule it out -- that your clientele have, by and large, been intelligent, rational, economically minded people. Or perhaps your mix is in fact more ordinary but you've internally excused the outliers -- perhaps they're just having a bad day; perhaps you've defensively taught yourself to forget such experiences. But there is obviously some sort of bias at work here, that you would say such a thing, that you wouldn't be cognizant that "intangible and useless services" constitute billions (trillions?) of dollars of market share each year. You also don't seem to appreciate that there are two sides to every deal. I phrased my previous reply in such a framework, and it has fallen on deaf ears -- or been willfully ignored (e.g. because you consider it irrelevant, because you've long since evaluated and discarded that point and have forgotten that it would be important/germane to reply with what your reasoning for that conclusion was, etc.). A contract is between two people. There are buyers and there are sellers. A deal is an agreement to exchange money. If parties agree to exchange money for tenuous material reasons, who are you to tell them they are in the wrong? That's quite rude of you! But most of all, you claim your point as god-given truth, and refuse to hear any disagreement -- a point easily disputed, fragile as glass. You've framed this as a question, a debate; but in fact, you only came here to pontificate. You've abused our openness, our desire to exchange ideas; you are nothing but a troll. You're welcome to change my mind on the above statements, but it is clear that the points you came here with, are not in dispute; these latter points are, it seems, the only truly meaningful matters to dispute here. Tim |
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