I see what you’re saying. She was told there would be no charge to come out and give an estimate before starting the work and then she wanted to have the freedom to decide whether to authorize the job or not once she knew what the price would be. She also might have decided to call another company to get a second opinion which might have been less money.
If the plumber is a subcontractor rather than an employee, then it is perfectly legal for the company to refuse to pay him unless they collect the money. Put it another way, if their agreement with the plumber is to pay him 60% of the money collected, then 60% of zero is zero.
If the plumber is an employee, it probably IS legal to dock his pay unless (#1) there’s a local law prohibiting it, or (#2) it violates the terms of his employment contract, or (#3) such action has the effect of reducing his pay for the pay period to below minimum wage.
<nitpick>
The phrase “service charge” has a specific meaning in the business world. It refers to the fact that paying now costs less than paying later and the difference between the two costs is called the service charge. For example, I might offer to sell you a bicycle for $240 and you prefer to take the bicycle now and pay me next month. I agree, on the condition that you pay me $260 next month. The extra $20 is called a “service charge”.
What you meant to say is a “trip charge” which is the cost of a “service call”.
<nitpick>
In my business (locksmith) our policy is that we charge for the service call, unless the customer specifically asked for a free estimate, in which case we don’t charge anything that day but we also don’t do any work that day. It sounds like that’s what was expected here but the plumber went off script.
It seems to me the problem is the bolded. When I call a plumber, I expect him to not just look at the problem, but to fix it (unless it requires a part he doesn’t have with him) and I expect to be billed. $120 seems steep for a “shortest possible visit”, but I don’t know how far he had to drive, nor what the going rate is in the area.
Was this some kind of sleazy come-on that got upcharged? Was is an innocent mistake in communication? That seems like an important distinction to me, but there’s not nearly enough info given to guess.
As for whether not paying the guy who showed up is legal, I have no idea. But I really don’t think it’s the major issue, the major issue is whether the neighbor owed the money.
It just occurred to me that you might be asking “Is it legal for my friend to refuse to pay the company the $120?” rather than “Is it legal for the company to refuse to pay the plumber who did the work?”.
In the strictest sense, she could argue that a verbal contract existed between herself and the company and she’s merely enforcing her rights under that verbal contract. But we only have her word that they offered to give her a free estimate. If there’s no recording of the conversation, no witness, and the company denies that they said she could have a free estimate, then she’d have a very tough time defending herself in court. The company will argue that she’s guilty of “theft of services” because she received the services without paying.
The only other option I can think of is if she can show that something about the way the company performed the work was illegal. For example, if the plumber was not properly licensed (or even if his license was expired on that day). Then she could argue that she can’t be expected to pay for something that was itself illegal.
There’s no lost cost from the fix, so the plumber doesn’t have to take $120 from the guy’s salary. If there were parts involved then he might want to recover the cost, but in this case there’s no additional expense for the guy fixing the problem. He was out there anyway on a free inspection. The fact that he took an extra 5 minutes to fix the problem doesn’t mean that they incurred an extra $120 of expenses.
It would actually be good business sense to fix trivial things on the free inspection. It would create a lot of goodwill with the homeowner and they would be very likely to use that company for any future service work. They would also be likely to recommend that company to their friends and neighbors. But instead, this company is creating a lot of hassle and they won’t get any repeat business. Penny wise and pound foolish is he.
If a company comes out for a free inspection, I would expect a written estimate before they get any money. If they end up fixing stuff as part of the free inspection, I wouldn’t expect to pay for that unless they explained the cost up front.
I don’t think a customer is going to take ‘I can fix your problem for a fee but I’m not going to tell you what the.problem is’ as an honest business aproach.
The standard used to be on site estimates are free but a lot of outfits are now getting away from doing so. Given issues like this I can’t really blame them. the magority of plumbers in my area have started charging for on site estimates rather than letting a customer waste time of three different outfits at no cost to themselves so they can pick the cheapest of those three. I feel like home owners trying to cheap out on paying for expertise has resulted in higher costs for everyone.
I hear ya. It would be a pretty difficult thing to justify and has a sort of sleazy feel to it.
I don’t really know then how plumbers should handle these sorts of things - they’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place in these small job situations.
The only good way out is the “we charge $X for a short visit to survey your problem and to fix it if it’s quick/easy/simple universal parts only. If the survey says it’s really a much bigger job then the $X is applied to our normal (lower) hourly labor rate plus all needed parts.”
I used to have a job where we did the “we’ll come out and give you a free repair estimate” thing. If it turned out to be something simple the customer should have been able to figure out on their own, heck yeah I was going to charge them. Maybe not a full service call, but something for wasting my time.
The way to avoid it is I would always ask “did you check X, Y, and Z simple things?” over the phone before I headed out. If I show up and it turns out to be Y, they don’t have a whole lot of room to complain.
This is a problem in many professions where the initial service call/consultation is free. The idea is that the business offers it on a good faith basis that the customer will fairly consider the services of the professional after being presented with options.
If you don’t carefully screen (and enact and communicate certain policies to the customer in advance) your business will be used during this “free” initial consultation to quiz you so that the customer can fix the problem on his own.
In many cases, it is best to charge a nominal fee that can be applied to the balance of the work if it is ultimately performed.
I concur. I once paid $.50 for a few tiny pieces of rubber to fix a leaky sink. A plumber would have charged $200, including not just his expertise, but time and costs traveling to the house. $120 for working heat sounds like a good deal!.
The point is, if he’s a contractor, then he doesn’t get a salary. He gets a percentage. So if the customer pays zero dollars, his percentage is zero. So, yeah you could describe that by saying something like “He doesn’t get paid today”.
Remember we are hearing third-hand information about what the company rep said on the phone about “taking it out of his pay”. It’s quite possible that the company rep was oversimplifying the situation when talking to the customer. It’s also quite likely that the customer didn’t clearly understand what the company rep said, or didn’t clearly communicate it to Newtosite. It’s also possible that the company rep was lying, trying to put a guilt trip on the customer.
We tried that once. A customer asked us to do a big job, several hours work. At the end of it, the bill came to $410. The customer came in to pick up the locks, my employee handed him the box and the bill, and he walked out the door without paying. All we had was the customer’s name and phone number. I told my employee he shouldn’t have handed over the locks without taking the payment first. He apologized and said “I’ve got an idea. Let’s call the guy on the phone and tell him that if he doesn’t pay you’re gonna take it out of my salary.” I agreed to let him tell that lie. It didn’t work, the customer never paid us.
If the plumber is an employee, he typically gets paid by the hour, and it’s highly unlikely that the employer would dock his salary just because the customer refused to pay. It might be legal, but it’s generally not how businesses operate. OTOH, I can totally see the employer getting mad at the employee for not following proper procedure, and if this was a recurring problem then it’s possible that one way of chastising an employee for violating company policy would be to dock their pay. But it still wouldn’t make sense to say that’s conditional on whether the customer does or doesn’t pay their bill.
It’s further confusing that a lot of people use the term “contractor” as a synonym for “building tradesman.” Yes, there are general contractors and sub-contractors in the building trades. And as a separate matter some such businesses use employee labor and others use individual 1099 or “contract” labor.
Two very different situations, both using the word “contractor”.
And as you say, we’re getting all this at least 3rd hand.
For what it’s worth I’d never dock a workers pay and I question the legalities of doing so. Any employee I have is paid hourly. They make the same if the cost me money or if they make me money. If they cost me money due to neglegance they wouldn’t stay employed.
In this situation it be a question of whether this type of issue is reoccurring for that employee. The first time is a learning experience and he should be better trained to inform the customer of potential costs. If this keeps happening clearly he isn’t who I’d want doing estimates.
I personally handle all my company’s sales and estimates. My paycheck is whatever I can afford to give myself. If this lady wanted to make an issue of the charge I’d just eat it and never work for her again. I don’t really have time for customers that don’t value my expertise.
In many cases being blacklisted from my company is never going to matter, but I am in a specialty trade and am the most experienced outfit in the area. Most well water work comes up on an emergency basis. If someone like me refuses your business you’d best hope one of the other 3 or 4 businesses have time and equipment available to take you on when you’re out of water.
I fully agree. In a sense, this is the basis of any economy based on division of labour: Having something done by someone else who’s trained and specalised in it and for whom it is, therefore, easier to do it than it is for me (if it is possible to do the thing myself in the first place). That way, comparative advantage and the welfare gains associated with it are brought into play. To the other side, doing the thing is easy, but that is not a justification for not paying, since this very easiness is what made me hire the other person to begin with. It applies in any trade that requires some sort of skill. Personally, I’m an in-house lawyer in a large organisation, and I get a lot of requests for legal advice that are easy to answer for me (other questions are more difficult, admittedly). Nonetheless, I expect to be paid my salary for doing that, because answering the same question would not have been easy for those who asked it.
The important thing to remember is that he was out there on a free inspection visit. There should be no expectation of payment unless it is discussed ahead of time.
What he should have done is first write up an estimate for “Reset EQ valve, light pilot. $120”. Then do the work only if the homeowner agrees. His mistake was not making that clear up front, so he takes the loss. It is perfectly reasonable for the homeowner to assume that the contractor may fix trivial things and not charge for them. That happens all the time.
On the other hand, the “free” part of a “free inspection” is limited to an inspection. As soon as the plumber got started on actually doing something, it was not an inspection anymore; it was actual work being done. That this work would take only a few minutes could not be known when the plumber got started, so this was the moment when it should have dawned to the homeowner that a charge could follow.
I perfectly agree that trivial fixes are often provided free of charge. Just as often, though, they are charged for. The mere fact that in many other cases such a trivial fix would be free is, in my view, not sufficient to allow the homeowner to rely on the assumption that this would also be true in that particular case. It is just as reasonable for the plumber to assume that a homeowner who called a plumber to get something fixed would pay for it even where this is not explicitly discussed in advance.
That really depends on the relationship between the customer and the contractor. If the contractor had previously done paid work for the customer I could understand a customer accepting a trivial fix at no charge. I’m more then willing to skip charging a customer for a minor issue if they we’re a past customer and presumably a future customer. Thier is no way I’d start a relationship with a customer in which they can waste my time at no cost to them with the possibility they’d never actually pay me for a future job.
I do not think it is reasonable for someone with no history or future commitment to a contractor to think they would fix a trivial issue at no charge, I do not think by any reasonable measure that type of activity happens all the time. Contractors are in business to make money not provide free services to the public.
I don’t agree with that. Homeowners will have all types of different expectations. The plumber is the one who is a professional and needs to get paid. If he wants to ensure he gets paid, he needs to make sure the customer also understands that. He can’t do some work before the price has been agreed to and then charge an arbitrary amount for that work.
Personally, I think $120 is very high for what was done. Places around here have a $50-60 minimum fee for a service call and I would expect resetting the valve to fall under that. If someone came out for a free inspection and then wanted to charge $120, I would think they’re ripping me off. If instead if was more like $50, I could understand paying that, but only if they told me that ahead of time.
I think the thing is that the contractor is coming out to give a free inspection with the understanding that the water heater was broken. I, er, admittedly don’t know what an earthquake valve is exactly but I assume it’s something that’s designed for the user to reset. There’s certainly instructions in the user’s manual and maybe a sticker on the body of the heater. If that’s all that was wrong with it, the water heater was not in fact broken and the service call to the plumber was not made in good faith.