Long Beach Plumber ripping customers off and charging too much? I don’t think so. Let me explain. I just received a second call from a customer that asked us to bid on a new 30-gallon hot water heater installation for her home. We bid the work at $1,500, not including the permit fee. For the specifics of this job, this was a very fair and reasonable price. The reason for her second call was to ask me why we were trying to rip her off!
I asked her what she was talking about. She said she had two other bids for the same work. Those bids came in at $600 and $750.
The commonly accepted wisdom when having work done on your house is to get three bids. This woman did exactly as she is told to do by the experts. And, it is a good thing she did. Look what happened. She has two bids around the same and one outlier. Clearly, the experts are right. She just caught a rip off, her rip off, in the making!
Personally, I am always wary of the rip off, the up sale, the bait and switch, hidden costs, hidden important information, the promise one thing and deliver another, the outright liars, cheats, con men, and charlatans. Sometimes I feel like I can’t catch a breath. I am drowning in baloney, pretending to be real information, presented to me by smiling faces. At times, it seems to be everywhere.
I called a cabinet contractor to get a bid on new kitchen cabinets. By the time the salesman was done explaining the cost to me, he had covered two entire sheets of paper with small numbers. Additions for this, discounts for that, numbers jumping around until I feel dizzy. Wow! The wall street boys would be proud!
Probably my wife, who is a teacher, should teach her students some of this magic math. “Now class, listen carefully. When you pull up to the house, if the car parked in the driveway has a retail value of $25,000 or more, add $3,000, divide by the number of missing teeth of the customer (If none, divide by 0). If the value of the house is $750,000 or more, add $6,796, this number is arrived at by taking 1% of the house valve minus the senior discount if the customer is over 18 years old, the veterans discount if the customer ever considered serving the military, the nice guy discount if the customer doesn’t curse at you, add 1.67458% each four letter word. If the customer has other bids on the same work, investigate carefully, numbers can morph into other numbers over time.
Despite her skepticism, I tried to assure her we were not trying to rip her off. I began to ask her a few questions. Well, it turns out neither of the other two bids were from licensed plumbing companies. They are unlicensed guys working illegally. I explained that a new water heater costs almost as much as they are charging for the job. Where is their labor money and profit? Turns out they were going to install used water heaters they had removed from some other job. Probably because they were leaking or working poorly. Apparently, I was unconvincing. We did not get the job.
The sad part about this story of three bids is that the temperature and pressure relief valve on the existing water heater was plugged up. For those readers who do not know the significance of that, please refer to Long Beach Plumber’s page on water heater dangers.
So, what is a homeowner to do? One bid, three bids, ten bids. If they are all from a bunch of characters, what good are more bids? Trust comes first. When that is achieved, everything else is, frankly, unnecessary. Not that trust is easy to achieve in today’s environment of suffocating baloney. But at least, we know what the goal is.
