How is that any different than having a paper route, or babysitting? Have some teenager come by to earn some extra income?
My grandparents had the kid who lived up the street come over and mow their lawn. Is that all right with you?
Unless you’re talking about a professional service (which, even then, I don’t see as elitist.) If you can afford it, what’s the problem?
Having trouble understanding how the guy got you from $30 for a one time lawn mowing to $140 a month. How many times a month is your lawn being mowed? What other services were you getting?
So he jacked up the price on you, and asked for an advance giving a number of different reasons, and got upset when you refused? Don’t blame you at all for firing him.
And leaffan, I don’t know what things are like in Canada, but in the US landscaping and lawn care is a huge business. Some people are older and can’t do it themselves, or they work and don’t have the time, or want a higher level of service than they’re willing to do themselves, etc. Not sure what your problem is there. SSG had a legitimate beef with the lawn guy, IMO. I’d consider it very unprofessional for a business, one man or not, to behave like this. If you agree to do work for a specified price, you should stick to that.
You seem somewhat, er, trollish. Convince me otherwise. :dubious:
FTR, and I don’t really know why I feel the need to add this, but Charles is a 42 year old white guy.
Thanks for all the responses.
SSG Schwartz
OK. My apologies. Really.
I guess I was having a bad day (and I was actually) but I seemed to read the OP in a Thurstan Howell accent. Try this in his voice: “Why I have to fire my lawnman.”
And I thought(sarcastically), with all the problems I have lately, wow, you sure have it rough SSG.
Honestly, if the worst problem you face is that you may have to fire the guy who cuts your lawn then life must be good.
I’m going through a rough period. A separate thread is probably forthcoming. And it ain’t pretty. Sorry. Continue.
Leaffan
What is ironic is that I took some courses on stereotyping and racism in college. One of the most easily measured traits of racism in the lab is associating different traits including occupation with different groups in the lab. For example, people being asked to choose the crack dealer from pictures of young black guys or 50-something white guys would make most people choose the young black guys even though one of the 50-something year old white guy was a convicted crack dealer and the black guys where elite college students.
Leaffan failed that test miserably by assuming we were talking about a poor minority worker here. To be fair, most people assume that but it is still documented and provable racism. Leaffan may need to reconsider views on who is capable of doing what jobs in either Canada or the U.S. My landscaper is a 20-something year old white guy and he started buying equipment when he was in high school. He makes a very good living now even though he wouldn’t make nearly as much if he was just a hired hand for another person that owned the business. You never know.
Touche’. Point well taken.
Where “here” is Carp, Ontario, I presume, 'cause it sure as hell is done a lot here in Toronto. When I lived in Brampton, no one on my street cut their own grass, because we all had big lawns. It was a pretty middle-class neighbourhood.
I don’t know of, and I have never known of anyone who contracts out their lawn cutting. No one. Ever. I’m middle class.
Ditto this Calgary (Canada) suburb. I get looked at a bit funny here by my neignbors because I cut my own lawn. They probably lump it under the same weirdness category that comes with being a SAH dad. All of them save one house have someone. There’s a 70yr old guy on the corner who does the lawns in the summer and the snow in the winter for 5 out of the 9 houses on our part of the street. He can probably lap me a few times if we were to run a mile race on a track. The rest hire big companies. I do mine mostly because I am absolutely anal/oc about my lawn* , and anyone else doing it would be a source of constant frustration at the “mistakes” they would make. The one couple that still do their own are French immigrants that have only been in country for 4 years, and used to grow hay in the field behind their house near Avignon.
** but kids playing on it make me happy. It’s what a lawn is for… *
My parents do. My Dad just isn’t physically up to it anymore and I live four hours away. Do you not have old people in the Ottawa Valley?
Curiously, my Dad can’t find anyone good either. For a few years he used one guy whose service was erratic. Finally last year he hired an old neighbour, a guy who he (and anyone who knew him) would have assumed would do a great job. Well, it’d be weeks and weeks before the guy would show up to cut the lawn; the grass actually kept going to seed. During the ENTIRE SPRING, SUMMER AND FALL, he showed up to mow the lawn nine times. (Nnnnine times!) He also did none of the other things he was supposed to - trimming, hedges, etc.
At the end of the season he sent a bill for $750. This is a SMALL lawn. I figure $100 an hour, easy. If that’s the going rate for cutting laws I should quit my job and cut lawns for a living.
My father, thankfully, refused to pay this outrageous bill.
I’ve lived in several Canadian cities and have known lots of people to have lawn services. It’s certainly not unheard of in Canada - actually I looked at the Yellow Pages for Carp, Ontario and got 106 results (http://yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/lawn+care/Carp%2C+Ontario). Admittedly many of those are based in Ottawa, but still.
Are you sure that when you see people mowing lawns, etc, in your neighbourhood that they’re always the homeowner?
Now you know all of us!
I remember that my dad always used to do the yard work himself; when we were early teens, he tried to get us to do it (my sister was pretty good at mowing the lawn, but I was a disaster). So I think around the time I left for college my parents started hiring someone to do the lawn.
I think my across-the-street neighbor does his own lawn, but that’s about it for my street; and this is a pretty solidly middle class neighborhood,
Lower middle class checking in! If anything happens to my husband, I’ll have a lawnman. I hate mowing. My mom had a lawnman after my stepdad died. She had a tiny lawn but lots of plantings, and the lawnman took care of all of it for about $75 a month from spring through fall.
It’s not a class thing around here. If you’re too feeble or too busy or don’t have the equipment, and if and don’t have neighbors, friends, or kids to help, you hire it done, either by someone in the neighborhood or a lawn service. Same with moving snow.
My lawn guys are white. 
Seriously, though… hiring a lawn service is unremarkable in the suburban U.S., especially here in the south with a year round growing season.
I think I win the worst lawnman award. I paid a neighborhood guy to mow my lawn a few times. He even used my mower or borrowed one when mine didn’t work. Once I even had him help me haul some junk to the road for pickup. I always tipped him $5 to $10 over what he had quoted me for the service. A couple times I had to turn him down because I didn’t have extra cash.
One day he broke into my home and stole some jewelry. I really had nothing of value except two rings, that had belonged to each of my grandmother’s. They were irreplaceable and had tremendous sentimental value. He traded them for crack. He’d been robbing the whole neighborhood including his friend who loaned him the lawnmower and often paid him to do odd jobs for him. His mother wouldn’t even let him in her house, he had to live in her backyard. This guy was probably in his late 40’s or 50’s. Some of the cheap jewelry was recovered in a stash in his mother’s backyard. All the stuff that was actual gold, the rings and a necklace I have never seen again. He’s in jail now and frankly I hope he rots in there.
I was afraid to leave my house for a long time. I’d often come home every couple hours and check on it. So aside from taking something from me that held a lot of sentimental value he took my peace of mind and sense of security in my own home. And what pisses me off even more is I had felt sorry for this guy and tried to help him out when I was going through financial difficulties of my own because I respected that the guy was trying to earn money. He was really just casing out my house for a later robbery. I have been leery of hiring anyone to do yard work since, especially if they come to my door asking for work.
I’m with the crowd here. My husband and I have a lawn service. Although, to be fair, we do not have a lawnman. Our lawn care specialist is a girl.* The vast majority of our neighbors also have a lawn service. The same lawn service, I think.
It’s reasonably inexpensive, and it’s most definitely less of a pain in the ass. Also, we do not own the necessary equipment, nor are we necessarily competant to operate and/or service that equipment. Frankly, I love my husband and he is a fine and competant person in his chosen field, but man can’t be trusted with power tools. And I freaking hate lawnmowing - I hate the noise, I hate the mowers, and I sunburn astonishingly easily. All in all, we prefer to shell out a minimal amount and let someone else deal with the hassle for us. Every other Tuesday afternoon from May through September. One of the reasons we’re sort of excited that all our neighbors have a lawn service is that this means that all lawn care in our neighborhood gets accomplished during regular business hours on weekdays. In other words, there is no asshole up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning running his freaking lawnmower in our neighborhood.
There are always some chores that it’s just not really worth it to me to attend to personally- like changing the oil and filters in the car (our dealership does this for free actually). I could do it myself, but why should I do necessary tasks I freaking hate and am not good at when I can pay someone else a reasonable amount to do it correctly and in a fraction of the time?
*Not a white girl, though, since we’re disclosing the ethnic backgrounds of our lawn care professionals. Latina. She and her brothers and her father are all partners in the business - they each have specific clients, but they’ll cover for each other in case of vacations or emergencies. It’s all very organized and really, really efficient. We’ve never had a problem with them. Hell, unless we happen to be home sick on the Tuesday she’s mowing, we never even see our lawn guy. If the OP lived in my neck of the woods, I’d recommend them.
I didn’t mean to touch off the controversy I did, I was genuinely puzzled.
Tooting my own horn a little here: I started lawnmowing and stuff when I was 9 and babysitting when I was 13, and that wasn’t really unusual. That’s why I was confused. Now I know.
Our lawn guys* are great. There’s three or four of them who come around in an old white truck once a week. One will mow the postage stamp lawn while another mans the leaf blower. The others will edge the lawn or trim the bushes if need be, but I think mainly they just take a break before the next and probably bigger job after ours. At any rate, they’re here and gone in fifteen minutes, having put the property in good order once again. Last year, they came earlier in the day, when late sleepers like me were still in bed, but it’s hard to begrudge them for the noise when you know it won’t last long.
*Not technically ours, since we live in an apartment building and the landlady is paying for them. Then again, she is paying for them with our rent money, so I guess maybe they are ours. They’re Hispanic, by the way, for those of you keeping track, though at least one of the fellows last year was Asian.
FWIW someone I work with operates a lawn care/landscaping service. He doesn’t do much of the work himself anymore, he has 3 guys that work for him. Out of curiousity I asked him about the OP’s situation. His take on it was “the numb nuts underestimated his costs - tough. You ALWAYS overestimate, and if you don’t you’re not going to be in business long.”
He also said he would never even think about asking customers for an advance. If it was a job such as roofing where he needed money for parts/materials he might ask them for a down payment. But asking for advance payments on labor is bad business. Plus if the guy doesn’t do the work you have to take him to court and try to prove your case to get your money back.
So there you have it from an actual lawn guy - very unprofessional behavior. Look for a new guy pronto.
Dang, there goes my notion of an egalitarian Canadian society in which the watchword is “to each, acording to their own lawn-cutting abilities”. 
This occurred to me too. What if Charles shows back up at your house with a fearsome high-powered mower, covered in grass clippings, oozing green liquefied matter out of his pores and starts gobbling up stray Texas critters while hungrily eyeing your children? You’ll be sorry!!
We do all our own lawn and garden work. The 65-ish woman who lives next door has a crew in to do it weekly. She is not a dead ringer for Mrs. Thurston Howell.