Everyday RIP-OFFS (1 Viewer)

[AjayM]

In my opinion, I can say this would be better than basing insurance criteria on statistics that are totally independent of risk values.

How are the statistics totally independent of the risk value? If 20% of males age 16-20 are involved with accidents and are at fault....yet only 8% of males age 30-40 are, why is it hard to understand that it would cost more to insure the younger driver? The insurance company takes a larger risk with that group of people than it does with the other.
Andrew

 

[Ryan Wright]

Insurance also varies their prices by location. If a certain location has a higher incidence of drive-bys you can get insurance will cost more than in a place where there are fewer drive-bys.

I don't think you understood the point I was trying to make.
Here's what I'm saying: Nobody would accept insurance companies discriminating based on race. "You're (black/white/hispanic/asian/indian) and are therefore more likely to use this car in a drive-by shooting, or as a lethal weapon, or to otherwise commit a crime which will end up costing us money because we insured you" would never fly. So why is it acceptable to do the same based on gender or age?

 

[John Berggren]

$3/month to NOT be listed in the phone book--give me a break

Unfortunately having lived both ways (with or without the listing) I pay the $3. It's a ridiculous unnecessary fee, but what can you do? It also cost me $50 for them to turn on my phone (entering some data on a computer) and they put it on the second line in my new house... not the first. They then wanted to charge me to come out and change it as a repair rather than rectify!

But I digress...

There are ripoffs abounds, but the truth is, it's always "what the market will bear". Unfortunately, spend as I will, I will never be a market unto myself.

 

[GordonL]

So why is it acceptable to do the same based on gender or age?

Maybe because there is a correlation between frequency of accidents with gender/age and not race?

 

[Leila Dougan]

So why is it acceptable to do the same based on gender or age?

Ryan, I fully understood the point you were trying to make. In addition to what GordonL has said, this is how I see it:

(I'm going to use the term "discrimination" because that's how you see it, although I don't feel that it really is)

1) Insurance companies "discriminate" against people based on age and gender in regards to being at fault in an accident. Statistically speaking, the 18-24 age group causes more accidents than the 25-35 age group, just as males are shown to be more aggressive while driving than females.

2) Insurance companies do "discriminate" against race in a way because that is very closely tied to location. Statistically speaking, they say that x ethnicity has a generally lower level of education, lower income, and tend to live in higher crime areas. Because of this, your chances of having your car stolen or vandalized while in these areas are higher, so they charge you more.

The "discrimination" the companies make don't all target the same reason you may need insurance. They are not saying that, in general, all African Americans are less skilled drivers any more than they are saying that any given individual is more likely to speed in Montana than in Wyoming.

So, they "discriminate" against age/gender for the at-fault accidents and "discriminate" against location (race) for theft and vandalism.

Of course I don't work for these companies or know anybody that does. These are just my perceptions.

 

[Steve Schaffer]

Moe wrote,

Understand that I'm not complaining that the job needs to be done by a professional with the right equipment (and their time/labour must be compensated for)... rather, it's the issue of OVERBILLING that upsets me. It's illegal for pretty much every other industry - why make it legal for mechanics/garages?
If you charge $20 an hour for services rendered, and it takes you 45 minutes of service to complete a job-order, then charge appropriately! Rather, the industry appears to create it's own numbers, and charge what it wants.
When your precious car is in pieces on the mechanics floor, and they insist that you need a new timing belt/water pump/thermostat/doohicky which will cost you $xxx (but really only costs $x), what are you going to do? Argue? They've got you by the balls!
================================================== ==============================


Moe,

Stop thinking "hours" and start thinking in terms of how much labor is performed regardless of the time actually taken to do the job. The amount of labor done is the same for any particular job regardless of speed of performance. Substitute the expression "units of labor" for "hours" and you get a better idea of what's going on. In that "units of labor" definition, include such factors as the degree of skill required and the risk of injury involved in doing a specific job as well as the time it takes to perform it.

This flatrate system is not exclusive to auto repair. Plumbers, housepainters, roofers, electricians, and most other service industries use a variation on the same scheme for determining labor charges, rather than charging for actual hours worked.

I'm sure if you checked with most ISF calibrators you'd find they work on a primarily flat-fee basis for performing different aspects of their jobs, and that fee may not reflect actual time used to calibrate the set. One Tosh 50H80 may take 3 hours to do grayscale correction, the next may take 6, but the fee is probably the same for both.

In the case of Auto repair the vast majority of labor estimates for specific jobs come from one of several "flatrate" books, the most common of which is Mitchell's. Electrical diagnosis and other jobs that have no predictable time to perform are usually charged on a "straight time" basis--you pay for the actual time spent to find and repair a short in a wiring harness, for example.

These books base their labor estimates for specific jobs (i.e. waterpump replacement) on the actual time it would take an average tech with average tools to do the job on a specific make and model with specific options and engines.



A very skilled tech or one who's invested in special tools specifically adapted to certain jobs can beat that time. We are paid on a flatrate basis, per job, not on salary or straight hourly pay, so there's a great deal of incentive to work harder, faster, and smarter. This produces more profit for the company and weeds out incompetent techs to a certain extent because if the car comes back due to a botched job, the time needed to fix the mistake is deducted from the tech's pay.

This flatrate system is the only way we can give fair estimates on repair jobs, so each customer pays the same price for the same job.

In shops where techs are paid hourly rather than flatrate, efficiency goes way down and since there's no backflagging for botched jobs, quality suffers.

Believe it or not, there are frequent cases where a job actually takes longer than the flatrate time due to rust, broken-off bolt heads from previous repair attempts, etc. NO extra time is paid for these problems.


How fair would it be to charge you $15 for a t-stat replacement and have the next guy with the same job on the same car pay $30 because his tech had a hangover and couldn't work as fast?

I know that on the surface it looks unfair, but it's really all about incentive to put our more and higher quality work, and charge each customer the same price for the same job.

Auto service is a product, just like a shirt or clock radio, consisting of materials and labor. Should identical shirts be priced differently according to how long it took to stitch them up?







"So", you say, "if it usually takes less than the flatrate time to do the job, then the flatrate time should be reduced to reflect that"

Keep in mind that in most cases the job is done faster than the flatrate time because the tech has invested his own money in specific tools or training to help him do that job quicker than the average guy with average equipment can do it. We do have to buy all our own tools and they aren't the cheapies you find at Home Depot. So we techs have overhead of our own. A typical toolbox alone costs more than most 57" widescreen rptvs, and may contain 30k worth of hardware. Few if any techs make more than about a quarter of what you pay per hour for labor. So if you're charged $75 an hour, chances are the guy who does the job is making maybe $19hr.



So if I'm willing to invest $150 in a special tool that lets me complete a specific job 15 minutes faster than flatrate time, should I not be compensated? At my rate of pay I would have to perform that one specific job 30 times before I broke even on the cost of that tool. Use a timing-belt driven waterpump as an example--I might average one of those every couple of weeks.

If I save 20 minutes on a particular job because I'm willing to cut my hand up on a part that blocks access rather than remove it as the service manual recommends, shouldn't I have some recompense?


Auto repair is most people's biggest thing when it comes to feeling ripped off, and justifiably so since most folks know little or nothing of how their vehicles work and way too many shops take advantage.

It's also a huge source of misunderstanding and miscommunication. At our shop we guarantee every job for a full year. This means that if we have any reasonable doubt about a timing belt idler pulley that takes 3 hours to replace, we're going to recommend replacing it at the time the belt is being replaced rather than risk having it fail within that year.
If replaced at the time the belt is done, there's little or no extra labor involved over and above that charged just to do the belt.

If it fails within a year of the belt replacement, we have to "eat" the labor time necessary to go back in and replace it.

For every customer who gets upset about additional stuff found when doing timing belts and such there's another who brings a car in for an oil change and comes back a week later claiming that oil change caused his alternator or water pump to fail and demands a free repair or he's gonna call the local tv consumer reporter on us.

Add in folks who demand warranty repairs on bent antennas, banged up suspension parts, broken interior parts, ripped up upholstery or exterior trim pieces that they just plain broke out of carelessness or due to accident, and I'd
dare to say that the majority of the fraud in the car repair business is perpetrated by the customers.

 

[Chris Lock]

> That "statistics" garbage is an old and tired excuse with little backing, and should be outlawed.
I guess you've never heard of an actuary.
Those of you complaining about males paying more for insurance: if that practice was banned, the result would be bringing the rates for women up to the level the men are paying. You don't think anyone's rate would be cut, do you?
> Same thing with Hollywood movies.
Maybe because movies cost so much to make now? Who is forcing you to go to the movies?
> If I sell you something for $25 that you can get for $10 down the street if you knew about it, aren't I ripping you off?
No. If you hire me, and I charge you $60,000/year for work someone else would've done for $40,000, am I ripping you off? Should I have asked around & made sure nobody else was willing to do that work for less?
If people are paying full retail for stuff at Sam Goody that's cheaper elsewhere, too bad. Best Buy, Target, Kmart all advertise DVDs & CDs in the paper, & it's not hard to figure out that Sam Goody's prices aren't the lowest. Maybe the people shopping there don't care as much about price as you do. Maybe they liked the convenience of running into Sam Goody while they were already at the mall, rather than driving around to other stores looking for a better price. Maybe they value their time more.
> Banks have decided that almost anyone whose credit score falls below perfection is at a "higher risk", thus having to pay higher interest rates and fees for a loan.
Are you saying people with a history of paying bills late or not at all are not more likely to continue that behavior? And that their ability or willingness to pay back the loan on time shouldn't have anything to do with determining the rate?
It's not hard to get a good credit score- pay your bills on time.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

It also cost me $50 for them to turn on my phone

Be thankful you don't live in Japan. $700US to turn on your phone

 

[Eric Kahn]

Lucky me I have a good friend who is also a mechanic, did my work for years so I went out and bought a car he refuses to work on (VW)
for those who say the Post Office is a rip off, the US Post office has the lowest rates of any industrialized country and gets no tax money so they are no wasting your tax dollars, also consider that they are still mandated to deliver and pick up everywhere in the country (I think parts of alaska are excluded from daily pickup and delivery)
for the same rate, they can not pull out of "unprofitable" areas (UPS did just this,they no longer deliver in most of alaska, they pay the post office to do it)
the biggest rip off I have seen lately is being charged 2to 3 dollars for a bottle of water at a sporting event after you discover that the extremly rare water fountian you found does not work

 

[Jassen M. West]

At Six Flags New England... You pay $10.00 for 3 pcs of chicken a handful of fries and a coke as a guest in the park. The employees can enjoy the same meal in an air-conditioned setting for $2.75. Now thats a ripoff.

---jay

 

[Jeff Kleist]

I think the employees deserve an air conditioned place to eat, since they're busting their butts out in the park day-in day-out no matter what the temperature for menial pay

 

[Jeff Pryor]

What pisses me off is paying $2.75 for a 12-ounce mug of beer at my local mexican restaurant, yet a 10-ounce mug of beer of the same brand costs $1.75. Why must I pay a full dollar for an extra 2 ounces?!

 

[Carl Miller]

The second biggest "ripoff" in a restaurant are the pasta dishes. They have the biggest markup. The best bargain, surprisingly, is a steak dinner. They have typically the smallest markup percentage wise

I'm with you on the pasta markup. The egg white scam is another favorite of mine...when restaurants charge extra for egg white omelettes for example. Take the yolk out, charge more. I know, it takes manpower to remove the yolk.

My wife pointed out a rip off to me today I figured I'd share. My son was hospitalized a few months back for an infection he couldn't shake. We got the bill from the hospital yesterday and on the list was a $3 charge for each dose of childrens Tylenol.

Two days worth of Tylenol, 8 pills, cost $24. Buy a bottle of 100 for $7 at a drug store, pay $300 at a hospital for the same amount of pills. Seven dollars....300 dollars.

Yeah, that's a rip off.

 

[felix_suwarno]

cigarrettes. biggest rip off of all time.

 

[Jassen M. West]

I didn't say that the employees don't deserve air-conditioning, i think they do, my girlfriend is a lifeguard there, try standing in the sun 9 hours a day and keep your concentration focused looked for people in danger. The topic of this thread is rip offs (of course someone always has to get offended), that being the case the point of my previous post was...i think its a rip off that i pay $45.00 to get in the park and $10.00 for a meal that otherwise cost them $2.00 to make. i say its great that employees get such a good discount but to go from $2.00 to $10.00 for the same meal? think if car companies did this, a car salesman would pay $20,000 for a new Altima but the consumer would pay $100,000.00?

my 2 pennies-or should i say dime...
jay

 

[Charles J P]

RE: auto insurance... statistics show that teen females are MUCH more likely to get into accidents than teen males, however, teen males are much more likely to get into catestrophic accidents. It would be easier to name off the girls in my high school class who HADNT been in an accident, however, males are more likely to be in high speed accidents involving other cars whereas females are more likely to hit a car/pole/stationary object in the parking lot, or go in the ditch with no other cars involved. There have been studies that show that up to the age of 25-30, males have far better driving skills than females, but males are much more likely to over extend themselves past their skills. Also, on the whole, something like 85% of the population thinks they're a better than average driver.

 

[DarrinH]

I have a tip for you, we make many, many long distance calls each month and the service we had through AT&T was a rip off compared to phone cards issued by... AT&T? What?
Yes, we cancelled our long distance and instead of paying 10 cents a minute with 4.95 fee we pay 3.4 cents per minute with no fee using their phone cards.
I just program the 1-800 number into the phone and then program the phone card # into the phone as well. A couple of extra button pushes and you get a much better rate that you can even take with you when you travel.
These cards are sold at Sams club Wholesale Warehouse and when they run out you can (recharge) them over the phone with a credit card. Saves you the trip from going back to Sams club for another card.
Right now I wish there was a good pre-paid option for cell phones. Now those are a rip off!

 

[AjayM]

RE: auto insurance... statistics show that teen females are MUCH more likely to get into accidents than teen males, however, teen males are much more likely to get into catestrophic accidents. It would be easier to name off the girls in my high school class who HADNT been in an accident, however, males are more likely to be in high speed accidents involving other cars whereas females are more likely to hit a car/pole/stationary object in the parking lot, or go in the ditch with no other cars involved. There have been studies that show that up to the age of 25-30, males have far better driving skills than females, but males are much more likely to over extend themselves past their skills. Also, on the whole, something like 85% of the population thinks they're a better than average driver.

Well thats true, but the end result doesn't change. If a girl hits a pole or a tree or something like that, it causes minimal damage compared to the male who totals his car and maybe somebody elses.

As to everybody thinking they are an above average driver, I used to think that as well, then I took a couple high performance driving classes, which taught me among other things a lot about car control...it also taught me a lot about how quickly something can go from what seems to be "in control" to totally out of control, and I'm not talking from a skidding/car control point, I'm talking from the point of that you could be doing something stupid and think you are in total control, 110% aware of what's going on around you...and one little thing can turn that all around on you.

Andrew

 

[Moe Maishlish]

Steve,
Thanks for the that detailed explanation of the auto-repair industry! I appreciate the fact that you could put it in perspective!
I still can't help feel a little ripped off though... :b
Moe.

 

[Mark Larson]

While I was there last week, I had the best $7 bowl of soup, I gladly paid $25 for a baked stuffed shrimp and scallop dish, and I thoroughly enjoyed my $8 heavenly piece of banana cream pie, but for $8 I want my watermelon served to me on the bare belly of my beautiful waitress.

A quotable quote!