worf928

eff if I know.

jheis

The Rayco employee who resurrected this two year old thread should be fired for incompetence. Bringing it back to life did nothing but generate more bad press for Rayco.

Ethre: Nobody likes to get taken, but If you don't want to pay the mark-up on oil, do you're own damn oil changes & spend the time to buy the oil, collect the used oil, & recycle it.

Shops get a wholesale price on parts because they purchase a certain a volume from the distributor. You, on the hand, are buying one part at a time, so you get charged retail. If you were generating $10 grand a month for the shop, they'd probably change your oil for free.

It's called being in business (as opposed to being out of business). Get used to it.

The_Phantom

I posted in one of the other threads but since this is the one with the most traffic I thought I would add my additional experience here as well. I went to school at Wyoming Seminary (www.wyomingseminary.org) a college prep school that is about two miles away from Rayco. Why does this matter? Most of the parents of the students at Sem are in a sense the target audience of Rayco since most of them drive luxury cars. As this is the case, I have heard a tremendous number of complaints about Rayco from the students and their parents that either had cars serviced at Rayco or bought cars from Rayco or at least went in to look at their cars. Some of the complaints I had with Rayco and my friend Dave had with Rayco are detailed in the thread located here https://rennlist.com/forums/924-931-...ars-in-pa.html . If Rayco wants to challenge our experiences I'll post more stories. I've been hearing people complain about Rayco for twenty years and I have more... a lot more... Quick fact- Rayco is known as Rape-Co by lots of people that live in this area of Pennsylvania- referring to the way Rayco 'rips-off' customers.

Bill Ball

As to the TT job in an automatic...Yes, I've replaced TTs and TC bearings w/o dropping the rear crossmember and tranny. BUT, it's a trade-off. You have to remove the bellhousing (or cut it - a no-no). You can get the TC cover off to replace the bearings, but you cannot remove the TC itself to service the seals behind it. Also, removing the TC cover this way takes some small tools to get to the upper cover bolts. I have done it this way because I didn't want to hassle with all the rear end paraphenalia and drain the tranny and detach all the hoses to drop it out. If you can get the bellhousing and the upper TC cover bolts out, my method is faster and easier, but it's a close call. If you use my method, you need to be careful that the TC does not start to come out as that will wreck the seal and you will then need to drop the tranny anyway. Sooooo...next time I will probably do it the WSM way.

Regardless, 8 man hours seems like a very low estimate of the labor.

Ethre

Dave - I've got no objections to covering the costs. Indeed it seems to me that billable hours would perfectly cover the costs you are talking about. Of course, if applied honestly billable hours would probably annoy both sides (I see customers getting annoyed with labor charges for parts searching, and some mechanics no longer benefiting from flat rate billing).
Even so, to my mind that is a more just system.

I doubt it will gain much (if any) support though.

Read the thread and you'll find it wasn't my oil or vehicle. I object on moral principles since I consider it beyond the scope of the business.
It sounds to me like you felt the need to comment without following the entire discussion.

Landseer

I got my first taste of running a shop last week.
Amazing eye-opener, believe me.
A couple of great customers. A couple of others.

One car was highly neglected. I personally worked the car, putting over 20 hours into it, a third of which was cleaning out rat ****. (less time will be charged --- we were trying to invest a bit extra to make him real positive about the results of what we were doing and build trust). Guy originally only wanted some periphrial work done in the pod and with some minor accessories. Doing that work would have disturbed a dozen WYAIT items, creating the potential of the shop being forced to repair many other items. One circuit that he wanted fixed, when inspected, revealed burned wires and companion wires running the length of the car. A few very serious situations, actually dangerous, were also discovered during our overview. Not sure where it will end-up, but our line is drawn clearly and knowledgeably for any additional work. Some folks just can't seem to see their car in the big picture and some are actually prettty savvy and just want expensive repairs for free.

Guys, its very, very involved to run a shop properly. Customer selection is huge.

blown 87

I feel your pain.

M. Requin

Tom, assuming you are not just trolling here, I think what you wrote above might help you understand how retail works a bit better. Try this brain game:
Shop A gives away parts, but charges $1000/hour labor to "cover costs", and Shop B, across the street installs all the parts they sell for free, but charges 5 times what other shops charge for those parts. Who wins? Shop C of course, who charges a normal markup for parts and a competitive hourly rate for labor. Costs include all expenses, direct and indirect, and Shop C, maintaining a market-competitive position, will be lucky to eke out a small profit at the end of the day with its strategy, but that will be about it. In other words, when Shop C buys a spark plug for 2 bucks and sells it for 4, they are not gouging the customer, because they will be lucky to keep 30 cents of that sale as profit, likewise for labor rates. Each income source, labor, parts, whatever, has to be treated separately as a profit center. And one final thing, what is the difference, at the end of the day, if the shop makes, say 8-10% net profit, where the profit comes from? Is it more moral to make a profit on buying and reselling, or on charging for labor? And by the way, this is the crux in a predicament such as Chris outlined above - given the low margins shops work with, it is very easy to get upside down accommodating a customer whose demands are unreasonable. The owner/mechanic/service writer has to be very careful to avoid these situations, or best, turn them into a win/no-lose for the shop, not always easy to do. Sorry if this is too longwinded!.

Ethre

Martin,
No intent to troll here.

A great response from you. Quite interesting (and far from too longwinded ).

I absolutely see where you are coming from - in that the bottom line can be very hard to manage. Add low margins to unreasonable demands and we have quite a mess.
I also understand that my opinion here is very different from that held by most of the others posters in this thread. I see (in an ideal world) labor and sales being quite separate (not that one is inherently better than the other, only that they are separate).
So, to extend your brain game, in a way I do see Shop A as the more "ideal" situation. As I read your description though, it sounds as if Shop A is charging a sky high labor rate but not taking into account actual time expended.
Therefore, if I may, I would like to suggest a Shop D - who charges slightly more than what we would normally consider the "competitive rate", but charges this labor rate for all time spent involved with the vehicle. With the proper marketing, should it not be possible for Shop D to eek by the same as Shop C?
It seems worth considering that the current "competitive wage" may actually be held down by shops relying on a "normal" markup on parts to recoup costs.

I don't mean to imply that this would be an easy arrangement to implement given the current standard method of operation, but it is definitely something that I personally see being more justifiable. Moral opinions do make for quite a mess, don't they?

Landseer

Very complex. Each needs its own strategy and sales angle, too.

I learned of the dealer approach. Call in the staff. Huddle-up. Set a sales goal for flushes. $100,000 in a single month. Make it a performance factor in the HR review, including for mechanics who make recommendations for service. Incentivize: Free $X gift card for each sub target achieved (adds up to virtually nothing across the staff). Then, commence to sell the hell out of flushes that month. Got an engine light on? Gotta change some sensors and do a flush. Total freaking bs.
Sell them for each car system: receive special recognition for selling the "royal flush", i.e. flushing 5 or more systems at once. Not making this up. Major high end dealership strategy. Trans slipping, do a flush. (warranty work, but if you just do that warranty work, you miss the income from the flush). Let the rich biatch bring it back for the real work, later.

Come back next month and raise the target.

James Bailey

Walk up to the parts counter at a Porsche store and you will get the full retail price....drop the car in the service department and you usually pay 125% of the full retail price for the same part. The business model for most repair shops is to make a large percentage of gross profit from sales of parts and supplies. Always has been probably always will be. Also worth mentioning that the friendly service writer is payed based on commission....the more they sell you ....

worf928

And there you go. There's no perfect answer. Bottom line is that running a shop is hard work and making a profit doing it while keeping happy the customers that should be kept happy is harder still. The dynamics of the market have, over the decades, settled on the labor plus parts plus mark-up model. And then, to make sure that it is more difficult pad the labor, add-in the concept of book time.

Flat rate billing works well for volume-sold cars 'cause techs can get familiar-enough with them to not only meet or beat book time but also not screw up the job.

I've written it before and will write it again now: book time is why so many of our 928s are in such sorry shape. Very few techs ever did the same job on a 928 enough times to make money on them. Not to mention the fact that book time on the 928 is - at least as far as the few numbers I've gotten 'hold of - optimistic even if the 928 in question doesn't require remedial WYIT work. On a 20-year old 928 with lots of 20-year old parts that's been touched by lots of folks doing a job for the first time while watching the clock tick past book time.... it's just a recipe for serious unhappiness.

Ducman82

when i was a service writer for subaru, we had techs that could do head gasket jobs in 6 hours, book time was 9. so it does happen.

Landseer

And the tech makes $23/hr (not $125 that the shop charges) and is paid book. Has incentive to produce.

928 is a nightmare to work on, comparitively. Repercussions of so much complexity being packed into so small of a space. Book hours would have to be higher on a comparitive part, like headgasket. And these days, you can barely go into one without stumbling into other fixes just by disturbing something with your hands.

I mean, try an odometer gear fix. 1.5 hours book. Sounds fairly straightforward. Print Dwayne's guide. Buy the upgraded gear for $30. Well, the intensive washer button nut is cracked and breaks fully on disassembly. The light switch, defroster switch and odo reset switch each have one broken tab, so they are barely hanging into the crispy pod. One of the allen screws is stripped. The film has some cracks and is questionable, somebody has scabbed-in LED lights...list goes on.

What do you do with that? Depends on the customer whether you should even begin that job.
How would the dealer price it? Why would a customer take it to a little independent? Look at the downside risk of taking that little job. Interesting. That's why these cars are cheap.

tmpusfugit

Very early in my working career I worked as a field engineer for a company who sold and serviced some fairly complex electro-mechanical devices. A significant field change / inprovement was called a "retrofit" and we were allocated x hours for each occurance. One significant retrofit was planned at 3 mandays of work per occurance. I and one other engineer vclunteered to do many of them. In pretty short order we improved very significantly on the planned time...we were salaried so we just enjoyed playing mind games and always confounded management as best we could. Our best effort we did 4 of the retrofits in one day, and actually left early, our manager offered to buy us beer. So, we were doing them in 1/6th the planned time. We did more than 125 of the retrofits in less than 60 days...actual results we averaged about 2.9 per work day. Just goes to show how much experience does count and the average Porsche mechanic back in the day was not good on 928's, and even less so today...other than the very few specialists on Rennlist and the like.