I’m not saying I’d go there, just that if I bought a piece of junk* I wouldn’t blame them when repairing it turned out to be impracticable.
Beg to differ. Pretend the OP bought a $500 Mercedes from a junkyard as a daily driver. After a couple of days, she realizes it’s just not driveable. Then she takes it to a mechanic, who quotes her $5000 for an engine rebuild and transmission replacement. “$5000? That’s more than I paid for the fucken’ car!” That’s what happened here.
*I have also purchased $80 computers, but I know enough about computers to fix them or at least to figure out when it’s hopeless.
Whats your opinion on the shop that knows its impracticable yet instead of telling you that tries to charge you $380 dollars for an impracticable repair?
People often ask me to repair a +10 year old printer, I’ll charge €20 upfront, since many the times I ended up disposing of that printer afterwards.
Replacement ink could cost anything from €5 to €50 or not available at all, the part €5 (shipping €10), labour €40…… …. And then we have a perfectly brand new Printer with scanner & photocopy function on the shelf from €45-90 – that’s less and better than the old one.
I’ll tell, people, that I wouldn’t waste the money on it and that it’s economically not viable to repair the PC/Printer, buy I’ll do whatever they want me to do.
Often they do get a PC repaired for €140, that I could sell them 2nd Hand for €100-200.
Also, it is not made clear by the OP what that $380 repair includes – it might be complete rebuild of the PC, e.g. New Mainboard, CPU, RAM
For someone giving someone else crap about not knowing how retail business works, you are woefully misinformed about this. Retail markups are all over the place. I’ve seen them as low as 25% or less to as high as 300% and more.
I read it as, “well damn, for that I can get 4 more of these and a latte, and maybe one will work”. Taking advantage of female customers happens far too often in auto repairs, and I would expect no less from some computer repair places, especially if the OP gave them reason to believe she’s not tech-savvy. Is it hard to believe that some people are less than scrupulous?
As for people expecting a rant to be a verbatim transcript of the entire session (which occurred over the phone), along with scans of invoices, get real.
Lastly, while my first thought might be to reinstall Windows, it’s possible that an $80 used desktop private sale included neither an OS disk nor a recovery partition. Hopefully the OS sticker with the serial number is on the box.
If you want to spend your time haggling with every retailer you visit, that’s your prerogative. In many industries, however, there’s a relatively standard set of costs, and if you’re in the ballpark and do a good job, i’m happy to use your services without haggling. Like some others in this thread, i prefer a good-faith, reasonable estimate. There’s no law against a service provider shooting me a high quote, and then offering to drop the price when i balk. That person just needs to realize that, as soon as i work out what he’s doing, i will take my business elsewhere and never return.
Exactly, although i’m sort of reserving judgment a little bit, because the OP still hasn’t really told us what was offered at each price level. I’d be curious to know what sort of explanations she got (if any) with each price quote, and whether the shop made clear to her what type of parts and what type of work would be done in each case.
Emphasis mine.
So, instead of explaining the “penny wise, pound foolish” options, you simply begin with the top-priced quote? At least you’re honest enough to admit that your reason for doing this is serving your own interests. I’m sure the OP’s computer store would say the same thing. And again, that’s fine, as long as you don’t want me for a customer.
Rule of thumb if i’m your customer: you give me my options, and let me worry about my “analysis paralysis.” I’m a reasonably smart guy; i can work out whether i want to spend a bit more for the long-term fix, or whether i want to save some money and go with the cheaper alternative.
This part, i agree with, as i’ve already noted.
Did you actually read the OP?
(a) She did not “blame them when repairing it turned out to be impracticable.” If they had called her up after the first diagnosis and said something like, “Well, we can fix your computer, but it would be impracticable because it would cost you about as much as a new and far better computer,” i’ll bet she would never have started this thread.
(b) She did not complain that the repair cost more than the computer. Hell, she was willing to fork over 55% of the computer’s cost just to have them look at it. What she complained about—and i’m astonished that you keep missing this—is the repair shop’s strategy of offering an expensive repair job, and then dropping the price as soon as she balked. And, as far as we know, they never offered her any kind of advice about whether it was worth keeping the computer at all.
Perfectly reasonable. If someone (for whatever reason) really wants something fixed, by all means take their money and do the job. But the key here is that you give people their options. That’s the main thing i ask of a service provider.
Well, as you suggested in your previous post, that’s not really a “repair” in the proper sense of the word. It’s basically a new computer put into an old case.
I can also tell you that my in town competitor charges for similar fixes most of the times 20-50% more and sometimes even double the my quote.
The result is, I’m fairly busy, up-the-walls as they say here in Ireland - the other guy on the other side, has to do way less jobs to earn the same money.
The reason he can afford to charge higher rates is: better location (which also requires him to charge more: rent, rates)
Most people soon learn or don’t like the way I do things or because he’s Irish and I’m a dirty foreigner (- yes, this matters here.)
Either way, I started to not give a shit, what he does.
I start with the quote that actually fully fixes the problem. The customer typically comes with issues with the product and I work an estimate that solves the problem such that it will not be back in the repair queue 9 months down the road with an even more expensive problem. As a backup I do an estimate that will let the equipment limp along to whatever finish line the customer needs in the near future. This really isn’t hard to grasp.
No. I am going to give you a couple of options, and in rare cases I might work on a third option. But beyond that it starts to simply not be worth the time to put together the estimates that are simply going to cause the customer to delay in making a choice as they fret over the multiple line-items. You might be smart, but even the smartest people can have decision-making breakdowns if a single decision becomes a multitude of micro-managing choices. This isn’t like deciding on a sunroof for a new car - this is time = money and if I have to micromanage and walk them through a dozen individual choices, each of them taking 10-30 minutes of customer walkthrough explaining their relative short and long term importance then the quoting process is going to take forever and my company is going to lose money overall.
Before you go thinking I am pulling this out of my ass, note that this is a known factor in sales.
First, i never required you to offer a dozen different choices. I’m simply saying saying that some choice is important, and it should be offered up front. That’s been my position from the very beginning. If you do offer some choice up front, then that’s fine, although it’s still not really clear from some of your rather contradictory statements whether you actually do this.
Second, i think i see the main problem here.
What you do (you haven’t said exactly what it is that you do) is apparently almost completely non-analogous to the types of situations we are discussing in this thread. Maybe we should discuss this in some hypothetical thread where the situation at hand actually resembles whatever mysterious industry you are involved in.
If explaining each separate option to your customer takes 10-30 minutes per option (as you claim), then what you do is nothing like the OP’s situation. In the case of a computer, explaining all the different options to a customer shouldn’t take more than a few minutes in total.
So, thanks for offering your insight on something completely different from the OP’s situation, i guess.
See that word in the headline: “better”?
The whole premise of the article, and of the business theory, actually assumes that the customer knows what the choices are, and what he or she gets for the money in each case. As the article says, in service industries, having three levels of service (silver, gold, and platinum, or whatever) makes decisions easier, but everywhere i’ve been that has three levels of service (the first that comes to mind is my local car wash) tells you up-front what those levels are. I know that if i pay for the top level at the car wash, i get the extra wax and sealant and other stuff.
In the OP’s case, what we have is a vendor who effectively, in their quotation, only offers the top level, unless you balk. Then you get offered the next level down. If you balk at that, there’s probably also a bargain-basement option. I have no problems with the three levels of service; i have a problem with hiding them from the customer.
Its a vendor hoping that the customer is uninformed and will pay the extortionate price. If it works they will take that customers money and probably laugh behind their back at how stupid they were, paying $380 for a $200 repair! If it doesn’t, they try to get what they can from them.
Fine, thats capitalism, they can do that if they want. But once I recognise thats their game I also have the right to call them a pack of price gouging cunts and never shop there again.
I’d think the whole $380 being almost 5 times more than the original cost of the computer, and also more than a brand new computer, would spell out in big bold blinking letters, “This repair is impracticable” to anyone with half a brain, without anybody needing to be told after the fact “paying for repairs of this magnitude as opposed to just buying a new computer will make you really fucking stupid” Does it even need to be said at that point? Hell, they don’t know how much she paid for the computer. They don’t know if she desperately needs this thing to run so she can salvage off her wedding photos or something. She comes in wanting a fix, they tell her the cost of the fix. Leave it up to her to make the decision if it’s really stupid or not.
Also “Analysis Paralysis” is a real thing. People think they’re brilliant, they’re a genius, and then they spend over 30 minutes picking between two shades of blue. Get over yourself. When dealing with clients you make it clean and simple - two options, pick one. Or “here’s the best plan of action, but if it’s too much we can figure something out.” I might give a third if they hate both, but any more and they’ll sit there with their thumb up their ass going around in circles. People have brain meltdowns over whether they want this set of drapes or that set of drapes in their living room. Give them an itemized list with 15 items that could or could not be repaired and they’ll take days or even weeks to muck through it.
People should only buy used computers if they are comfortable diagnosing problems themselves. At a minimum, you should format the hard drive and reinstall the OS. There’s no telling what sort of viruses, trojans, and rootkits the prior owner got infected with. Heck, they could install them on purpose to steal the info of the new owner!
If the computer runs Win7, I’m guessing it’s at least a reasonably modern system. Try to find out how much RAM memory it has. Make sure it has at least 4gb. You should reinstall the operating system. Did it come with any OS disks? Do you see a Win7 license key on the case? With a reinstall and 4gb+ of memory, the performance should be good.
I don’t necessarily fault the shop for that price. It seems a little high, but not totally crazy. I’ve spent hours removing crud from my in-laws computers, so I could see a shop having to charge that.
Again, this isn’t an added sunroof. People are bringing the product in for repairs. They want it fixed. Rarely do they come up to me and say ‘How much would it be just to keep it operational for a few months before we have to bring it back in for a more critical and possibly expensive repair’. I have the quote for the latter in my pocket, but I won’t be pulling it out
Well, sorry Mr. Facebook I’d really rather not tell you my industry details and personal info.
There actually are very many comparisons, for example: Explain to me, in exact terms, why 8GB of memory is better than 4GB. You can’t just say ‘it makes the computer faster’, either. Not only does your customer want better details on the improvement, but they now want figures for particular computer usage - Do you have the Photoshop load times for a 2010 era computer using 8GB is vs 4GB off the top of your head? Now explain monitor resolution and why the high resolutions - oh, did we mention this customer is severely farsighted and yet asks your 20/20 vision opinion? Did you know the last guy with poor vision who bought a hi-res monitor complained about the wasted expense because he has to run it at a low resolution so he can see the icons, but the other guy 2 years ago loves his? Imagine trying to explain this over the phone, or with only a store computer in front of you, or heaven help you, over email.
I’m not even in the computer repair/sales industry and I can see right away how this shit would get bogged down fast.
But is the repair actually impracticable? Thats what the customer now doesn’t know because she cannot trust the vendor.
They quoted $380, then dropped to $244. If they are ripping her off at $380 then who is to say they aren’t still ripping her off at $244. Maybe she brings it to another store who says they can overhaul the machine for $100, no bother at all. Now the repair isn’t impracticable at all.
Errr, what? The OP mentions specifically that it was for some extra RAM and some virus cleaning.
Quite frankly, there is pretty much nothing else you can do to a laptop. Maybe replace the HDD with a SSD or something, but that would push it way past $250 or even $350.
So we’re looking at a memory upgrade, probably proposing going from 2 gigs to 4 gigs, based on the probable age of the system.
Laptop memory pricing is pretty static, differences in memory pricing is usually by memory type, not by stuff any given machine can actually use (and if there are any price differences, it’s generally going to be “Monster Gold Cable” level bullshit)
My suspicion is that the price difference is mostly a matter of how much they’re overcharging to run Malwarebytes.
I realise you’re saying that there are still Win 7 machines out there, and there are. In Kam’s case, that’s not really relevant unless it is available on affordable machines.
Dell Australia offer a much smaller range of machines that the US or UK sites, and the prices are often much higher than the exchange rate would suggest they should be. Yes, you can get Windows 7, but I can’t find a machine for under $549 that offers it as a choice. In fact, if you click For Home > Shop > Desktops > Windows 7, it gives you a choice of five machines and the cheapest one, at $399, doesn’t offer Windows 7 as an option. The $599 machine does. If you go back to Dell.com.au (because the Windows 7 link has taken you to a part of their site with a different menu), then go to For Home > All Desktops > filter: Windows 7, it shows 5 machines that all offer Win 7 The cheapest is $548.98 because it is on sale for $150 off, but that sale ends today.
You get similar results if you go through the same process for laptops.
Kam could get $470 dollars worth of repairs on her $80 computer before she exceeded the cost of buying a new one. Given that her old machine had XP on it and she only upgraded because work required her to, not because the machine wasn’t keeping up, she clearly isn’t maxxing her machines out to the limits of their capabilities. A 2 to 5 year old machine would probably fulfil her needs for some years to come. It might be a older if it was originally a Vista machine, but my point stands.
The ‘repair’ to be originally done was adding **3gig **of RAM, and cleaning out mal/spyware and other evil viruses that the repairer assured me were infecting my system. After I chucked a hissy-fit, the offer was 2gig of RAM, and same disinfecting.
But just to piss me off even more, they rang yesterday to tell me the computer was ready for picking up by 11am today…but as I was working, couldn’t do the pickup until 2.00pm. All good, right? “No worries”.
I was there at 2.06pm, and of COURSE, the computer wasn’t quite ready yet was it?? “G’is an hour love, it’ll be ready by then!!” :: rolleyes ::
Looks like this might be turning into a battle of wills…and I don’t lose these battles. Fuck me over, you’ll be the loser mate. I am more than prepared to toss the computer into the recycle bin and wear the cost…but your business will lose more than I ever will!
