Nicely put. So often the arguments to 'how can you charge me so much' come down to:
If others are so much cheaper why are you asking me? Why don't you do it yourself. i) No time. ii) No skills. iii) No tools. iv) Not certified/qualified/legal.
Which all come down to my time is valuable, my skills have a price, my tools cost money and they wear out and get stolen and finally getting qualified is very expensive.
Why do you think my time is not worth as much as yours?
The most determining factors on getting me to do work for someone is a) How busy i am. b) How near they live to me. c) Past experience good/bad of hassle and paying.
Rarely less than cost, but certainly at lower than the sort of rates I need to charge across the board get my target income.
No should about it: I do so if I'm thus motivated.
There's a whole other argument there, wildly OT for uk.d-i-y, but I thought it was generally accepted that purchase taxes such as VAT favour the better off whereas income taxes favour those on lower incomes. So it really depends on what one means by "fair"
Or both. No-one *has* to engage me to do a job so if they have ideological objections to subsidising the worse-off they can employ as fundamentalist free-marketeer Adam Smith type.
From each according to his ability To each according to his need.
Which is fair enough. The point is that the price does vary based on the supplier's perception of the customer's ability to pay.
That can be for reasons of wanting to help the person who is going to struggle to pay while effectively subsidising that from those who can pay more.
Equally, one could say that the "old lady rate" is the "fair" one and that the other punters are being gouged in their deep pockets.
It's a matter of perception and motivation.
Provided that it's structured in a tiered way, as is done a little in the UK, but more extensively elsewhere, it's very fair. Zero rate or low rate the essentials such as food and energy and have higher rates for non essentials. Thus the less well off are protected while the better off, who want to buy consumer goods will pay the taxes.
There are at least two other benefits:
- Encouragement of saving and retirement and healthcare provisioning
- Ability to fine tune in specific sectors and activities. For example, it's possible in France, to reclaim VAT on many types of home improvement.
I am sure that all but the most naive would expect that you would do this. the more far thinking might even work out that some years into the future they may need more creative pricing.
Plumbing is an awkward trade as the required standard is perfection. No one is perfect. My hit rate for joints is around 98% (all types of fittings). Of those that do leak 90%+ are detected and dealt with at the time. That leaves the ones even if it's only one in every 500 joints which cause a call back.
When I first started my percentages were worse. My apprentice said "It's one thing doing this in college on the bench it's a bit more difficult doing it in a badly lit cellar with old pipes."
He forgot "lying on your back in a confined space, working above your head so the cr*p falls in your face, with spiders running over you, the tool you need out in the van and the householder repeatedly asking 'is it finished yet?'".
If you had to revisit to rectify a problem then that's fair enough isn't it. I'm sure generally people have better things to do than call up plumbers for ficticious problems (although I agree this sometimes happens) People tend to call back when they have a problem not for the fun of it.
As for charging "well off" people more. Then how exactly do you ascertain this?
The type of house, where it is, the decoration, what the person is wearing, age, how they speak? Its bordering on discrimination. Its fairly difficult in most cases to know who is well off and who is not.
Ripping people off in any field is simply unacceptable and is sheer greed. No wonder the Polish people are getting all the jobs. (although from experience are learning your ways too)
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