Dealers get paid by the manufacturer for recall work. I think that is the actual reason for the aggressive recall calls. Not the government pressuring the manufacturers.
But does the government pay the sometimes ridiculous rates we civvies pay? If they have to spend all their time fixing things at a preassigned govt. rate, the real money will go elsewhere.
I don’t understand the question, sorry.
When Toyota had loads of Prius issues, Toyota was ordered to do a recall. Toyota dealers were guaranteed payments for Toyota for the repairs and seemed very helpful in getting it done. Also sent mail & made some phone calls to get the work.
If the return envelope is postage free I will write on the return form “This is my wife’s ex husband (or my husband’s ex wife). He/she does not live at this address. Please do not send their mail to this address.”
The amount of junk mail, especially credit card applications, has dropped significantly since I started doing this.
Who set the rate the government would pay for those repairs? How did those set prices compare to what those shops would charge a civvie for the same job?
Who mentioned government paying for repairs? I’m really confused by your question. I’ve never heard of the government do such and didn’t mention them. Is this related to something earlier in the thread?
Sorry, my mistake-I somehow saw “Manufacturer” as “Government”. That still leaves the question as to how much the manufacturer compensates the dealer for those repairs compared to how much a dealer would charge a customer. A dealer’s maintenance shop has only so many man-hours available, so if a major recall happens that could take up all those man-hours for a bit of time. I can see why dealerships would rather concentrate on higher paying customers.
Very, very little experience on my part, but my brother was the parts manager at a Toyota back in the 2000s.
My limited understanding is the compensation must be good and the dealerships usually have the capacity for it. I’m sure a busier dealership just doesn’t solicit the extra work and pushes the recall customers to a different less busy dealership.
Sorry, just realized, if we want to continue we should probably spin this off to its own thread about automotive recall work.
A trick from Back In The Day… take their Business Reply Card and tape it to a brick. They’re responsible for postage.
I think I’d wrap it in kraft paper first, so the post office didn’t know it was a brick.
If they did they’d say "Hey, another guy who was a rebellious kid back in the 60s and read STEAL THIS BOOK! (Abbie Hoffman’s how-to-stick-it-to-corporate-America book)
There’s a standing joke around here that no one who’s ever ordered or been sent anything from Harry & David can ever completely drop out of sight - Harry & David’s marketing department will find them.
Awhile back I got fed up with the volume of promotional mail from the Nature Conservancy, up to two mailings per week. After I e-mailed them to note that 1) I’m donating money to them only around Xmas-time, and 2) their excessive mailings are wasting energy and trees, they did cut back to a much less heavy promotional rate.
The school from which I got my MBA has been amazingly persistent and successful in tracking me down. Regular mail, email, home phone work phone, cell phone.
I have two other degrees from schools whose Alumni offices I haven’t heard from for 15+ years.
My wife got her BA and JD from the same university. The BA people are forever badgering her for donations 40+ years later. The JD people? Nary a peep. I think she eluded them with an address change 20 years ago.
Go figure?
True. The fundraising seems to be done by the college of business, not the University as a whole. Though that is an MBA/JD thing. I went to a school where the business school had more name recognition than the university it is attached to, but in general there are many people who get MBAs who identify with the school (Fuqua @ Duke, Wharton @ Penn) rather than the university itself.
I went to a particular art school for ONE SEMESTER, back in the mid-60s. To this day, I still get mail as one of their “esteemed alumni.” They’ve tracked down my address across several moves.
The official way to refuse delivery is to just write “refused” on the item and put it back.
I see that senders have a choice of paying a higher rate, and the USPS discards the items with no further charge, or a lower rate, and the USPS charges a disposal fee. But that sounds difficult: I haven’t seen authoritative information on disposal charges, it’s just something I’ve read on the internet.
My father was still getting junk mail from Reader’s Digest… almost 10 years after he died. My mother did write "Deceased’ on several pieces, but it did not stop. She started writing “Gone to meet the choir invisible” and “This is an ex-customer” and “He’s bleeding snuffed it” on the mailings. It eventually stopped.
Pro tip: If you ever have occasion to manage the affairs of an elderly relative, rent a PO box in their name and file a change of address from wherever they live to the PO box. Don’t just have their mail sent to your home address.
Once they eventually die that PO box can be used to handle all the estate paperwork. And once the estate is settled you close the PO box. That way the poor schmuck who rents it next has to deal with a decade’s worth of junk mail addressed to your dearly departed. Not you at your house.
Do NOT ask me how I know.
They’re the worst. I learned a long time ago to set up a junk email address for dealing with car dealerships and then abandoning it when I’m done. The only way I’ve ever managed to get off those lists is to reply to it asking them to remove me. Naturally, they’ll tell me to hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button. I’ll usually respond with ‘no thanks, I didn’t ask to be put on the list so I’ll just reply to your emails each time asking you to take me off’. However, the trick is to come up with every email address you can find for anyone at the dealership, other sales people, the service writers and most importantly, the GM. Often I’ll send that email a few dozen times over the course of the next few days, just to annoy them.
However, this can backfire. From what I can tell, they don’t actually manually add your email to their list, they just have a system in place to automatically add all incoming email addresses to it. I got bombarded with spam from one dealership after I emailed them to ask about getting my transmission oil changed.
I take that back. There was one other way, but it was a fluke. Somehow my regular email address got hooked attached to someone elses account. Every time he took his car in for any kind of service I’d get an email asking me to rate them. I emailed them a few times about it but got nowhere. Finally, knowing that car dealerships ask you to rate them on a scale of 1-5, from the dealership (or regional level) it’s a pass/fail system. That is, if you don’t give them 5 stars, it’s a fail and they get called out for their poor service. I finally got sick of the emails, gave them 0 stars for the oil change and in the comments explained, again, that I’m not that person and I’ll continue to give them 0 stars each time they email me asking me to review “my” oil change. Never got another one after that.
No, they aren’t. If you try to abuse the postal system that way, at best it will be thrown away and at worst you will be contacted by the USPS.
Cecil wrote on this subject-
Can I mail a brick back to a junk-mail firm using the business reply envelope? - The Straight Dope