Suspension springs snapped!!

[danny_p]

also being in the trade what a lot of people don't realise is how much labour actualy costs ether.   say if i employ a monkey there take home wages and what they actualy cost me to employ are significantly diffrent. as well as the cost of running a workshop.   

when people ring me up to do somethign or bring there car tractor or whatever in they want it NOW being abel to do NOW, if everything was booked in a month in advance and turned up when it was sposed to i chould work for quite a bit less per hour, but i have to leave some time in the day to do the stuff that just turns up, and deal with callouts.

but customers being customers do as they do and generaly don't book things intill there broken and want it back today and if they do book it in they don't allways turn up when there meant to.  so you have to budget in your hourly rate for that.

this morning i was planning to put a clutch in a mk4 GTi that was booked in and soposed to turn up first thing it rocked up at 3 in the afternoon,    result it buggerd me up work wise till 11 oclock when parts for another car turned up i was planning to do in the afternoon.  result me unpayed for 3 hours.

as for customers supplying there own parts  i agree with thom,   they are forever wanting to supply the cheepest shonky ebay crap that ether don't work don't fit right or is just plain wrong,  well what the hell do you do with car while there sorting it out whitch can take a week or more  with mailorder crap the answer is bill them for putting it back to a point it'll roll out the workshop to somewhere it can be left for howerver long and try tolerate it being in the way.  and they moan when the cheep shonky part fails after 3 months and want you to swap it over for free.

some even bring 2nd hand parts well what the hell do you do when that 2nd hand starter has been a 3 hour battel to fit turns out to a duff one it's sort of hard to get payed when you say,  yes mate starters fitted but it's worse than your old one.

even with new parts from a reputable source if it dosent fit or dosent work as it should theres not much i can do about it. if i order it i can ring them up and in a few hours a van drops the right bit off  and if i order the wrong part ooops my mistake it cost me time but that my faut and i can deal with that.   

also with parts you may be abel to get say a wishbone for £17.00   i can get that same  wishbone for £12.00 but i am instead buyingg a wishbone for £22  as i know the one i can get for £12 is utter crap.

also we have to buy all those fecking stupid spectial tools to fit various parts ok we'll use them more than you would but a lot of them on't get used much and a very bad value for £ spent on them v's the value of work they do

the other thing is the garage is also provideing credit. with some customers often for a hell of a lot longer than nessasary 

there rant over -  today customers pissed me off

[Thom89]

Its quite simple really, most people choose to have their cars repaired by a garage they can trust, and are prepared to pay for the service, the minority choose to repair their own cars, which is fair enough, and luckily they are able to buy parts from the likes of GSF, and also luckily for that minority of people, they don't have to pay around 75k a year in rent, rates, gas/electric, phone services, various different licenses, accountants charges, laundry services,  premises insurance, motor trade insurance/liability, burglar alarm services, vending machine services, water rates general property maintenance, the list goes on and on, and the money has to come from somewhere, and I've not even mentioned the staff getting paid! regardless of whether the garage is busy, or not, they still get paid the same... quite simply, the money has to come from somewhere, the mark up on parts is quite small, like I've already said, and is widely accepted by the general public as par for the course, clearly, otherwise we wouldn't be as busy as we are, with never having to advertise

Thom

[Wayne]

today you can directly go to the parts supplier of your service supplier.  For heating/plumbing you can go to The Parts Centre. For builders you can go to screwfix or a builders merchant. For car parts you can go to GSF etc..

I cannot see any justification as to why plumbers/builders/garages should put a mark up on prices when ALL they are doing is phoning up and ordering stuff.

Where is the added value to justify the margin?

People who accept such practices are either incompetent or mugs.

If you got a builder round to build an extension and he said it would take 500 breeze blocks. Would you be a bit annoyed if he charged you 80p a block when you could have phoned up the builders merchant yourself and bought them for 60p.

Garages are not retail. They don't hold stock to sell to joe public.  They operate to fix problems. They order the necessary parts to fix the problem and are paid for their time and effort in doing so.

If a garage can get good discount at a parts supplier and make margin when charging me the same, then that is good business practice.  But when a garage charges me more for the part than I can get it myself, I see no justification.

They do not, most garages get say 10% discount so they can then charge retail, they have to make money to live, I worked in a garage for 4 1/2 years and a motor factors for nearly 3 years so I know how it works.

Its quite simple really, most people choose to have their cars repaired by a garage they can trust, and are prepared to pay for the service, the minority choose to repair their own cars, which is fair enough, and luckily they are able to buy parts from the likes of GSF, and also luckily for that minority of people, they don't have to pay around 75k a year in rent, rates, gas/electric, phone services, various different licenses, accountants charges, laundry services,  premises insurance, motor trade insurance/liability, burglar alarm services, vending machine services, water rates general property maintenance, the list goes on and on, and the money has to come from somewhere, and I've not even mentioned the staff getting paid! regardless of whether the garage is busy, or not, they still get paid the same... quite simply, the money has to come from somewhere, the mark up on parts is quite small, like I've already said, and is widely accepted by the general public as par for the course, clearly, otherwise we wouldn't be as busy as we are, with never having to advertise

Thom

Spot on

[AudiA8Quattro]

Agree with the above, however some of the marking up i've seen on parts in the past has been unacceptable.

[danny_p]

some of the cost prices take the piss,  so even if you pass the parts on at cost the customer still thinks your takeing the piss. 

[AudiA8Quattro]

some of the cost prices take the piss,  so even if you pass the parts on at cost the customer still thinks your takeing the piss. 

I meant for example a garage that charges £45 for a set of rear brake pads when they can be bought retail for about £20.
This is just one example, i've seen many over the years.

[clipperjay]

Regardless of justification £300 for some springs to be changed we don't even know if the shocks the OP is ok?
mmmmmmmmmmmmmm  
 
Real Question is all you lads in the trade or own businesses would you charge £300 for a young lad coming in with a MK2?

[dan_apps]

Thom im not going to quote what you have said but you have summed it up well! my friend is starting a garage business and apart from getting over all the problems of opening accounts etc he has no discount to pass on to customers on parts, they dont know him from Joe Bloggs so needs to prove he can pay his account first! in these hard times you need to be keen where it matters and can afford to be....well less keen where it doesnt matter! e.g. having a ramp taken up for more than 3 hrs of the day is going to cost you other jobs that need doing.

Followers of Elvi would know from my posts

give me a break!

[danny_p]

Real Question is all you lads in the trade or own businesses would you charge £300 for a young lad coming in with a MK2?

enough small jobs like the one in question ( swaping a couple of rear struts ) i used to occasionaly  do such jobs as infills for a free or a few pint if i knew them  or existing customer.   

[tech1889]

so has he got a cheaper price after this fiasco ??