"A Hot Water Heater, a Porcelain Toilet, and Six Hours of Labor, for Only $5,000"
These are my personal experiences, impressions, and opinions, but I believe they are solid. If I didn't believe that, I would not post them here.
I am a retired law enforcement employee, and during most of my decades of service I held supervisory positions.
It is thus doubly degrading and injurious, to have some business swoop in, ostensibly operating on honest terms, and then later come to the conclusion that I got thoroughly reamed. This has happened to me once or twice before in my life, and it is very demoralizing: a small piece of your self-esteem dies each time ("How could I have fallen for THAT!"), along with a piece of your faith in humankind.
I had a hot water heater that was old, and had suddenly developed a puddle around its base. I also had a toilet with a hairline crack in its tank, causing a few drops of condensation to gather on the bottom of the tank. If you rubbed your hand under the tank, the condensation would leave a few drops of water on your palm. I used marine glue to seal the hairline crack, and that sufficed for ten to fifteen years. I also had in a second toilet a very slight leak; the toilet would constantly run a tiny trickle of water into the bowl, almost imperceptibly. As a rule, since we did not use that toilet much, I simply kept it turned off, unless company was visiting.
All three of these appliances were operational, and there was no emergency need to repair them. I nonetheless decided to attempt to get all three appliances examined and brought up to par, replacing the hot water heater and the toilet with the hairline crack, if necessary. At the same time, I planned to have two or three generic hardware items in the second toilet tank replaced, to cure the water trickle.
A Furr's tech came, and said repairs were needed urgently to prevent complete appliance failures, flooding, floor damage, etc. He advised I'd get more-or-less market rate costs for the appliances and parts, and market rate labor charges. He talked about how God had greatly blessed me by preventing these three appliances from devolving into disasters for my family. He told me he was going to give me a genuinely generous deal, by tossing in for free a hose or a valve here and there. He called his boss (supposedly), to negotiate the best deal for me. The call lasted a matter of seconds. He swore he was giving me the best possible price for everything he would be doing; he described it as an "unbeatable bargain." He even threatened to leave his "deal" on the table and walk out, if I balked at the costs he was directing my way. He was smooth and slick, jovial and humorous.
He ordered a toilet to replace the one with the hairline tank crack; from my careful research, the toilet appears to have cost about $400. The hot water heater he ordered appears to have cost around $900. He hustled me into buying a service plan, mostly in order to benefit from "an immediate discount," and he also replaced the two or three generic toilet tank parts in the toilet that had the small, constant leak. The total cost for materials thus ran around $1,500 (if that much). Roughly an hour was spent by the tech examining my appliances and doing the sales pitch, including doing the service plan hard sell (all of this time was covered under the "free estimate" I was promised). Additional substantive time was spent going to pick up the toilet and the water heater. The tech was in my life for a total of about seven hours, and the final bill was $5,000.00. Deleting out the above-mentioned wasted hour in which the examinations and estimates and sales pitches occurred, and with or without including the driving time to obtain the toilet and hot water heater, that works out to close to $600 per hour in labor costs ($3,500 divided by 6 hours = $583 per hour).
Let that sink in: Almost $600 an hour for labor, all of it being performed by one person.
To reiterate, these appalling numbers came after I received my immediately applicable "service plan discount," and an additional deduction of $400, when I complained the estimate was still outrageously exorbitant. Without either of those two deductions, the estimate would presumably been around $6,000 for the work done at my house, or about $750 an hour for the labor ($4,500 divided by 6 hours = $750 per hour) .
The only other explanation is that the water heater, toilet, and toilet tank parts were marked up ridiculously.
It is my distinct impression that the meetings with prospective customers in this kind of situation are intended to start out at price points that are exorbitantly high, in order to end up at lower price points that are still exorbitantly high. Whatever the result, it's all a win-win situation for F.H. Furr. The final cost to the consumer is not "a deal," whatever lines get fed to the customer. In my opinion, he or she ends up gouged, either way. read more
