The South East Texas Car Repair Shop Tour or, How to Go Into Debt Making Poor Decisions
Here is a story about something that we see and experience far too often…
We hear from a lot of new customers who either call or bring their cars in…. who have been on what we call “the Southeast Texas Car Repair Shop Tour”……
They have a problem with their car, so they get on their computer and look to some “internet forum”, where “all the experts meet” and where they find what they believe to be the fix to their problem. So…Plan A !
They recruit their brother-in-law – he works on steam cleaners and pressure washers – to order the parts that the online forum said would fix the problem. The brother-in-law and the owner then spend the next two weekends installing the internet parts and after spending $450, plus two cases of beer, it does not fix the problem…
So he moves on to Plan B. He drives the car, with the check engine light glowing, down to “Johnny” at his local gas station and has him take a full swing at fixing it for another $600. But this effort does not fix the problem either… (But now the car has this “funny noise” on acceleration…)
Okay, so he’s out a thousand dollars or so, and a couple of cases of beer. He decides to stop fooling around and implement Plan C!
Confidently, he steers his car-in-need to see “Robert” at the local foreign car shop (which is right down the street from the gas station). Robert works on Asian cars and has all kinds of computers to help him. So he gets Robert to give it a shot and spends another $800 trying to fix the problem…. but it is still not fixed.
So now, (you guessed it), they are on our doorstep, at Motorcars Ltd, with a litany of woe, a broken car and with a broken bank account and asking us to fix the car for what they think they “can afford”… Given all the money they have spent.
The problem is that now, for us to fix the car, we will have to undo all that has been done and then figure out what the original problem is… and then fix it…. for say $800……only to have this now “very grateful” customer who, having found us, is now going to trade his now fixed car for a new car with a warranty….. and we will never see the customer again….
We call this the “Great Southeast Texas Car Repair Shop Tour”…
The lesson: had they brought the car to us in the beginning, then it would have cost them some amount of money (more than the gas station) but it would have been fixed once and for all… and certainly for less than the slow investments in hope and despair with the well meaning shops on the tour…
Understand that this story is actually all too true. We hear this story almost daily. In every case, we could have saved the owner money and a lot of grief.
