Keeping The Lights On
Posted On: Sunday, August 14, 2011
What’s not often passed onto the customer are the costs of running a shop. Which in this modern age. can be pricey. Regardless of size, a shop has expenses that have to be paid by the work generated. there are the obvious ones, like the rent, electricity, heat and other utilities.
But there are also substantial cost of equipment and technology. In order to work on today’s cars a shop must have state of the art scanners, diagnostic software, and lab scopes to analyze vehicular data streams in a effort to extract critical information for accurate vehicle repair. without such info , Techs cannot deliver accurate repairs. Other equipment such as vehicle lifts, floor jacks, lubrication equipment and the likes are necessary to operate a shop efficiently and effectively.
Good trained service personnel cost money, period. Usually techs are classified as “A”, “B”, “C”, techs, and the more high-grade techs in a shop, the more it cost to pay them. In order to attract a high-grade technician these days . shops must pay good hourly rate or weekly salary. In addition, Health Insurance and other benefits such as a company car often go into the package to attract the class “A” technician.
These Technicians have to go to school on a regular basis to keep up with automotive technology. Without this training, techs cannot repair vehicles in “book Time” allotted for a particular service operation ( not to mention the occasional headache job that comes along that every tech in town has had his/hers hands on without success.) A repair shop usually pays for this training.
As you can see, there’s a lot more that goes into auto repair pricing than parts and labor
