Peabody said:Holy carp. If that was the cost when I was flat rate I'd be making $90/hr.
When I started my apprenticeship our shop rate was $18/hr, so in today's money a little under $70/hr. So while shop rate is over 10 times, mechanic's pay is only a little more than half that
Based on the $70 in todays money, shop rate is up 2.5 to 3x. 10x would be $700.
Shop rate is over ten times what it was when I started, but the point was that mechanic wages has not increased at the same amount.
In reply to Peabody :
This is true.
On the flip side, I don't know how much those old racks and racks of Mitchell books used to cost, but service info may run you four figures per month depending on how many services you use. (Most shops use Alldata but there are advantages to also having Mitchell, and Identifix also costs money but is a great time saver in how it can vector you to known issues, I don't know how much a business account with iATN costs but I have a personal account that I pay out of pocket, etc)
Everyone likes digital inspections and billing and stuff. The billing software systems are leased, Autoserve and Auto Vitals and Bolt-on and TechMetric cost a lot of money, etc.
And then there are the scan tools that need $1500-2500 annual updates and occasionally they age out and can't be updated anymore so you have to buy new, and some vehicles like Chrysler require that you pay a subscription to access the car beyond the security module, no matter what scan tool you have. TPMS tools also require regular updates and if you don't have one of those then you can't do tires or tire rotations, which means sending your customers to someone else. Alignment racks, if you have them, require regular updates and service. And so on.
This is before you get to things that need a pay per vehicle fee like reflashes, or even just programming in a new transmission in a Ford, but I'm not counting those because those just get added as a separate item to a bill and don't generally get absorbed into general shop costs.
I was asked recently if I'd consider opening my own shop. NO THANKS. I'll be an employee and let someone else deal with all that!
The last time I was working flat rate, I was paid 40% of the labor rate. This was not at the place with a 219/hr rate though 
But they also kept to a 60% average profit margin on parts. Obviously this has to be flexible because you can't have that kind of margin on a $3000 transmission but you also don't want it on an air filter either.
There are a lot of reasons. I'm sure insurance hasn't gone down either. Those Chilton manuals were holy cow expensive in the day but I'm sure nothing compared to the prescription model that has you guys by the balls. Funny, your flat rate percentage and margins are just about exactly what they were when I started.
I did a quick search yesterday to see what local rates are, but didn't come up with anything. $200/hr seems awfully high to me, I would be really surprised if ours was that high.
I sat on the couch with my coffee to watch qualifying this morning. Right after I got myself settled, the dog decided he wanted attention and pawed at me with his big meaty paw. Except he pawed at my hand. That was holding the extremely full cup of fresh-from-the-pot coffee. And after he knocked all that scalding liquid into my crotch, he proceeded to lay on me so I couldn't get up.
Not a great part of the body to have burns, let me tell ya.
I Second, third, fourth, whatever the comments about E36 M3 driving. Went to pickup a wagon in MA, the drive there went smoothly. But holy hell the drive back was pretty terrible.
Trying to get the trailer returned and have people driving 20mph in 30-35 zones. Slow on the highway and cutting lanes.
Tried to stop at Harbor Freight and the parking lot was ridiculous, just ended up leaving.
Oh and berkeley U-Haul one last time. At least the price was correct but they changed locations on me again. Pickup was ok, but drop off was a cluster berkeley.
If I go by my promise of not buying more cars until an RS3 or SQ5 I won't have to worry. Well one exception might be trying to find a classic beetle body. But that could go on a utility trailer.
I'm tired of this E36 M3.
God I love concrete-itis. It's a term my dad coined for people that lose all reason when concrete is involved
A landscaper that I've known for years hands my number to a guy he works for year after year for a little patio. In concrete there are no "little" jobs, it's inaccessible by truck so it needs pumped, the grade is horrible so it needs 12 ton of fill added and it's on a muddy slick hillside so bringing down equipment is gonna be a bitch anyway although I guess my landscaper buddy is gonna get more work fixing that disaster.
But wait, no.....not really. Guy tells me he can't afford to have a landscaper come out and fix a few sprinkler lines this year, so my buddy that nicely tried to get me some work won't be getting any work from this guy.
Load limits are up so I can't pour concrete, or even probably bring a line pump on the roads anyway. So I tell the guy, even if he loves my figure I can't pour for at least a little while and that I'll get back to him in a few days.
Guess who is texting me a day later at 7:30 on Saturday? Yep, this guy.
Now why in the berkeley would I want to do a job that has an annoying customer that doesn't have any money? Sadly I'm very certain this is gonna be a " no one wants to work anymore" guy too so that fun.
Having a construction company would be so much easier without having to deal with people and having money airdropped to me.....
In reply to Antihero :
"Nobody wants to work *for you* anymore".
One of my favorites was a restaurant owner bitching on social media that nobody wanted to work. Someone found his restaurant's want ad and he was offering $2.15 an hour and was acting like he was doing employees a favor for paying so much.
The pollen in Georgia is driving me crazy. I'm not allergic but I'm finding out that my cats are, and it's made my pool entirely yellow, not to mention my car
To all the people in Saskatoon who panic and come to a complete stop at the end of a freeway on ramp:
HONK!
In reply to ShawnG :
Wrong.
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNKKKKKKKKKKKK
KKKKKKKKKK!!!
In reply to Appleseed :
They got to enjoy the honk and then the sound of a GM 6.2 with a Borla exhaust system passing them at Mach chicken.
I would have been leaving about now to try out a new rallycross site at Edgewater in Cincinnati but this is what it looked like yesterday.
In reply to Jerry :
At least they got the venue name right.
The tenants at the Batcave have taken to not only parking vehicles in front of my garage door, but leaning boxes and bicycles against it.
When I signed the lease in 2015, I was told in no uncertain terms to not leave anything outside when I wasn't there, to maintain good appearances. I stuck firmly to this, and he's been good to me over the years. He can't get around much anymore so he probably doesn't know about the tenants doing what they are doing.
I burned my lip back enough it's blistered. On a ducking sandwich.
RevRico said:I burned my lip back enough it's blistered. On a ducking sandwich.
I see you also have a Samsung phone 
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
That would be Swype itself, Pixel 8 pro here. berkeley Samsung and the horse they road in on, haven't made a quality product, phone or otherwise, in over a decade.
Today's rant is brought to you by garage door openers. I have 4 garage doors, I have 3 openers, I now have ZERO working garage door openers.
At least the last one that broke exploded a plastic gear, I have no idea what this one's deal is, just went up a foot, and sounds like it's moving but doing nothing at all. No bangs, no pops, no broken bits falling from the ceiling, just spinning in neutral.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:RevRico said:I burned my lip back enough it's blistered. On a ducking sandwich.
I see you also have a Samsung phone
My phone is so well trained that I have inadvertently sent work emails with sentences like "I tried to get ahold of Craig in support, but I think he's berkeleying me". Oops.
I hate to be "that guy". And, frankly, Young Bill circa 1995 would probably stab me for what I'm about to write. And I think I've complained about this before. But...
This semester, as one of the courses required for my degree, I'm taking a 300-level English class called "Technical Writing". I was pretty excited for this because while I have spent the last 30 years of my career actually doing technical writing, I've not had any formal training in the subject. The writing that I've created has always seemed like it was above-average, but I am a total feedback whore and love to hear about how I can do things better. The assignments are based around a series of projects where each project has a couple draft assignments that then lead up to the actual project. Most recently, we were tasked with writing a recommendation report to an audience of our choosing that would compare and contrast three different "things" and then provide a decision matrix and final recommendation for purchasing one of those "things".
Writing this type of report is nothing new to me as I've done these over and over again. I was actually hoping to anonymize and turn in a giant report that I did for a local financial institution a number of years ago in which I did deep research on six or eight different storage vendors, did some heavy consulting with the various business units at the company, and then presented them with a 75 page recommendation report that was basically like a Gartner analysis but produced with their very specific needs in mind. It was one of the most brilliant bits of work that I had done but the only copy I had was an early draft that was incomplete. Since I didn't realize it was incomplete until about 4 hours before the first draft portion of the project was due, I had to crap out something entirely new. I got full points on that rush project but with a couple recommendations for changes. Then I did basically the same thing for the second draft portion. Crapped out something in about 30 minutes and got full points with a couple recommendations. Then, I procrastinated the final project submission and then sat down, read for the first time the recommendations that I got for my previous submissions and slapped together about 10 pages. Full points and a series of glowing comments.
I will be the first to tell you that I have an extremely high opinion of myself and I do feel like I have pretty strong written communication skills. If I could find a way to get paid to write, even as a side-gig, I would be absolutely thrilled and I think whomever was writing the checks would be getting their money's worth. Any time there was an opportunity at work to write something up, I'd jump on that grenade without hesitation. But even I know that I'm not that good. Surely my thrown-together report had at least one sentence that might have been a little clunky or unclear. At least one paragraph had to have been too long. There was at least one irrelevant detail that I could have edited out to make the prose flow more smoothly. That submission couldn't have been absolutely perfect.
The 4.0 is great, but I feel like I'm going to really hack this poor professor off when I write her an email later on complaining that I don't think I deserve the grade I got.
Small cat-
I get you want pets. I'm fine with that, I like cats. We have three, after all. But for berkeleys sake if you do not learn to sit in a lap like a normal cat instead of continuously trying to stand on my twig and berries and make berkeleying biscuits- you are going to be sent to Kennedy Space Center and shot into low orbit.
In reply to wae :
Your post is quite well written.
I am finding that many of the people I work with are what I consider semi-literate. That's probably what your instructor is used to, so don't fault the guy for not assessing you on a grad student level.
I'm using a car repair shop that's down in south Orlando, a 35-40 minute drive if there's no traffic (and there's always traffic, this is Orlando). They service a lot of the exotics and race cars in the area and really know their stuff.
I used a local independent tire shop for years, but they messed up some jobs that I had to pay other people to fix, and did about $2000 in body damage on my first Miata. Wife picked it up, didn't do a walk around, so it wasn't noticed until I got home that night. Naturally, they didn't know anything about it.
I only use them for tires now, and only if Costco doesn't have what I want. The business has been sold, it's now employee owned, so I might give them another go.
Meanwhile, I arranged to pick up one of my cars from the Orlando location while they were closed on Saturday. Seventy minutes to get there (traffic), and the car is locked up in their parking lot. Blew my whole afternoon.
Called to arrange pickup today, get ready to go, and my kid realizes that he's late for an appointment. Now I don't have another driver to bring the car home.
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