| What\'s Fair?
Corkage Fee for Installing Parts
The experience of being charged a corkage fee when you bring your own bottle to a restaurant and has now, it seems, been extended to the vehicle repair industry. Since repair shops make a considerable portion of their profit from the sale of replacement or performance parts, now when you supply your own parts, shop owners insist on charging you an additional fee beyond their standard labor charge.
This means, of course, that you’ll need to install them yourself, which means that you’ll often need some special tools and diagnostic equipment. Otherwise, you’ll end up paying a good portion of any cost savings on parts back to the repair shop. When you buy the parts from the repair shop you often will be quoted the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to negotiate.)
It’s a messy situation for both the owner and the shop, and I have to admit to being both angered and sympathetic to both parties in this situation.
Angered, because I was recently faced with a dealer (not Ducati) who wanted $1000 for a new engine management computer, or $500 to spend an hour installing my $150 rebuilt unit. It may have seemed fair to him, but it wasn’t to me.
Also, in my case, they first charged me $150 for a plug-in to a factory diagnostic tool that outputs proprietary diagnostic codes - that independent shop owners cannot obtain from the manufacturer even if they buy the tool. This is obviously intended to make sure that to go to their dealer in the first place. Weasels.
I suppose it would be wise to come to an understanding before-hand with shop owners, but what other strategies should we use to avoid outrageous corkage fee?
All of us are probably equally interested in making money and saving money, so I’d hope that riders and shop owners would be willing to share your opinions and experiences here on this issue.
In other words, what’s fair?  |