Posted On: January 31, 2005, 2:13 pm CST

Posted By: etimer

I am one of those people that do 97 percent of the work on my cars. Due to illness I couldn't work on my car and had to take my car to a shop for a new serpentine belt. I know from experience that replacing the belt is a 15 > 20 minute job and you must move the belt tensioner to replace the belt. The shop charged and hour labor to do the belt ...ok I can understand that because they must get tools ready, open a bay, have and open mechanic, etc. but then they charged me another hour to remove the belt tensioner. The tensioner is held on by one bolt and since they already had the belt removed, it takes 2 minutes to remove once the belt is off. They treated the jobs as if they are two separate jobs, as if I drove in off the street two different times. ALl they had to do was remove a blot that was already available to view That bolt cost me $50. Two hours worth of labor charged in 20 minutes. Can anyone imagine the billions of stacked excess labor we all pay each year. But that doesn't play well to the public because insurance companies are a favorite straw dog.

The business as usual of stacking multiple hours of labor charges in one hour of labor could be changing. When I billed as an Investment Advisor I could never have gotten away with billing for two hours when all I did was 25 minutes of work. If I did the SEC would / might want to talk with me.