What has it got to do with them you idiot? If the price for the job is acceptable to them, end of story. If it isn't they could DIY.
Do Tesco tell you what they pay for bread & milk? Do Homebase tell you they are making a 500% margin on stuff you buy?
Why should I? What pillocks like you don't understand, is that if traders didn't mark up parts, labour rates would have to go up manyfold.
They have the opportunity to buy the materials - assuming they have the knowledge & experience to know what they need & where to buy it. But they don't. Are you suggesting that detailed knowledge & years of experience should be free?
Next time you take your car in for service, try buying the right oil, filters, plugs, brake pads etc yourself, at the right price.
One of our two Homebases has just closed down and how the local Focus keeps going, I just don't know. For ages now, usually there's only you and the guy on the checkout in the place.
Toolstation and Scewfix do most of their business online/
Far fewer
Its not 100% availability OTC on the same day. Its 100% availability within
24 hours (claimed) from their central warehouse. Subject to availability.
But as with banks paying all their depositors at once, they can't guarentee to supply everyone if all their customers decided to order the same item at the same time.
They use unheated warehouses, fewer staff with a majority of sales online.
The difference with sheds is that there goods are bought on sight - customers will only buy what they can see on the shelves. So the goods need to be displayed in a comfortable environment. All of which costs money. As does the wear and tear of customers opening the stuff, dropping it in the floor etc etc.
& Toolstation offer free delivery over
So how much do you think it costs per hour to heat an average DIY shed in winter ?
The DIY sheds serve three different markets - the managemant dragging the old man around at weekend pestering him to tart up the house or the garden. Blokes looking for replacemant parts or bits, plumbing, electrical. screws etc when they don't know what to ask for OTC in somehere like Screwfix. And buying tools where being able to handle the goods is a bonus can lead to impulse buys and wanting to try the thing out that very afternoon. Rather than wait a few days by buying far cheaper online
The cost of running the van is part of the business's many general overheads, which are already factored into his labour rates. It's not helpful to account for van mileage on a per-customer basis. Isn't it more efficient simply to count one's time spent going to get the parts towards the chargeable hours for the job?
if you are quoting rates based on your actual costs there is no difference. If you aren't then look out for the job where you quote some silly labour rate and then get there and find they have already got the parts required for the job.
My local garage will fit the parts you supply, the labour rates are the same wherever the parts come from. Even the main dealer does the same.
That looks like you're cheating with the depreciation. You seem to be counting 6p/mile depreciation over 10 years. That's fine, and if you not unreasonably choose to write off the entire £11k over 10 years, you seem to be doing a bit over 18k miles per year.
But if you then come up with 13p/mile over 5 years or 20p/mile over 3 years, this suggests you're writing off the entire £11k over those
5 or 3 years, and I put it to you that whilst it's reasonable to assume that you're going to get virtually nothing back for a 10 year old car with 183000 miles on the clock, it's unreasonable to assume that you will get nothing back for a 3 year old car with only 55k miles on the clock.
Indeed, but as I've already explained elsewhere, it's a matter of partitioning the whole cost of running the car into two distinct categories. One represents the cost of having the car available for use, the other that of actually using it.
For me, depreciation, insurance, road tax, maintenance etc, all fall into the first category, because I incur these costs no matter how much or how little I actually use the car. This leaves little more than fuel in the second category.
Given that I already have the car, my decision to make any particular trip, inasmuch as its cost would affect that decision, will always be based on how much that trip will *add to* my total cost of motoring. In other words, going to the butcher's 5 miles away would cost me about £2.50 for the 10 mile round trip.
Looking at it another way, going to the butcher's every week would add 5000 miles to your annual mileage, but only £125 to your annual cost. So if on the basis of 18333 miles per year your total cost is 33p/mile, i.e. £6050 per year, then adding the butcher trips is going to *reduce* your per-mile cost from 33p to 26.5p (£6175/23333miles)!
So going to the butcher would "save" you £29 a week. Just think of all the free meat you could be getting on your car budget! :-)
Unless its a very specialized part I would deduct any travel time put on the bill to fetch parts and put it down to incompetence by the trader. A handyman should be able to do most handyman jobs without going shopping.
Quite so, this apparent paradox illustrates my point rather well. These aren't *real* savings, but result from the fallacy of costing trips on the basis of a pre-computed total cost of motoring per mile.
So long as the incremental cost per mile is less than the total cost per mile (which in the presence of overheads it always will be), each added trip will always reduce the total cost per mile relative to what it would be without that added trip. Simples.
I wouldn't know, I haven't needed a trades person to do anything for over a decade other than the car servicing. I do my own building, electrics, decorating, plumbing, gas, and just about anything else. The car is a problem as I have an allergic reaction to many of the fluids so it has to go elsewhere even though I did do body work repairs, engine rebuilds, etc. in the past.
I guess that if you called in a handyman to hang some pictures and the first thing he did was to go shopping for some picture hooks and wire you would be happy to pay for him to go shopping? and pay for his mark up on the parts too?
It's an either/or. One way or another his time will get paid for.
What he's more likely to do is to look in on the way back from another job, find out what you want then pick them up with his morning shop down the industrial estate and come back tomorrow to actually do the job thus minimising the gross time to obtain your part and thus charging a small but reasonable amount for obtaining them.
But some of these, at least, happen *faster* if you use the car more. If you only do a few k miles a year, it's gonna last a lot longer than if you do 20k miles/year.
*Total* cost of motoring, eh? But you're not doing that.
I think that's 500, not 5000, although your marginal cost is right. But you've omitted the other costs. Now you go to the bakers and the candlestick makers, also your granny and the in-laws. To which of those hundreds of other trips do you ascribe the costs you haven't properly attributed (you're not allowed to say "the inlaws" :-)
Of course doing more miles reduces your per-mile cost. Have a banana for stating the bleeding obvious. So what - your overall costs are still higher.
We went to Brum a couple of weeks ago. Turns out that even for two, the train was about the same as a proper cost/analysis for the car cost for the journey (rather to my surprise, although I expect the taxpayer contributed a large chunk). So we took the train.
That's not surprising if you add everything in to the cost of the car.
But many are those costs have to be paid anyway, even when the car is sitting in the garage. Have you added those onto the cost of the rail tickets?
My experience with rail, is that if you book weeks in advance, know exactly what time of day you will travel, and do a return journey from A to B, then you might be lucky enough to get two tickets comparable in price with the car journey.
Except the rail journey will be station to station, and the car journey will be door to door, so the former can involve extra costs.
A more typical, spontaneous, one-way journey by car, will be usually be considerably cheaper, faster and more convenient than any rail journey. And safer (in terms of being accosted by drunken strangers).
Unless there's no parking at the destination... (eg. central London).
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