Our competition is a little less so

[NecessaryCatharsis]

We have many tiny small competitors in our area but only two larger main ones.

1 is a similarly small sized company to us, east of us, and our territory overlaps as we head east, and north east. The closer to us the jobs get, the less we charge compared to them, the closer to them the jobs get the more we charge compared to them. In other words we are competitive pricing, both our reputations are good, there is lots of work to go around, and all is as it should be.

2 is a different beast. They have a horrible reputation for poor workmanship (probably because their guys are under so much pressure to perform quickly instead of well), are three times the size of us, never too busy that they can`t steal jobs from us, and the worst part is they price waaaay less than us, or anybody else. They price entire jobs for less than we could purchase the materials. Not just one or two, but all the jobs. So we get too many people going, `we want to use you, you have a better reputation but you have to get closer to this pricing.` During the slow times we often have to drop jobs low enough that we are just covering payroll so we can give the guys some hours. Competitor 2 also has a habit of coming at the end of the job with a huge list of extras that they bill the customer for, things that obviously needed done and should have been in the original quote (and was in everybody else they bid against) but are now added to the bill. They are also far and away the number one source of repair jobs that we are called to do.

However...

The last two weeks every job we have quoted against them they are the same price or even 1-2% higher. Are they starting to change their ways? Are we going to get to compete fairly in the market now against a company that is willing to charge enough that they may actually make some money? Will their work ever improve? Only time will tell, but already this is way less stress for everyone in our company.

[mhkohne]

We have many tiny small competitors in our area but only two larger main ones.

<snip>

However...

The last two weeks every job we have quoted against them they are the same price or even 1-2% higher. Are they starting to change their ways? Are we going to get to compete fairly in the market now against a company that is willing to charge enough that they may actually make some money? Will their work ever improve? Only time will tell, but already this is way less stress for everyone in our company.

Might just be a change of management, and the new guys want to actually make money. Alternately, someone in a position of authority may have noticed the 'always pad the bill' trick, and had words with them. Words like 'fraud' (because if you ALWAYS leave shit out of your quotes, then it very likely IS fraud of a sort).

That kind of attention could easily make someone chart a new course.

[eltf177]

Could be their reputation has finally caught up with them, and they are finally being up-front about prices which calls for a realistic bid...

There was one contracting company around my area that did this for years. They underbid their competitors to get the job, then after starting work hit all sorts of "problems" that required extra charges - which is where they made their profit. They finally ran into a developer who refused to sign the contract with that clause and somehow got it taken out. Contractor lost their shirt on that job. Coupled with the fact this little stunt of theirs was fast becoming common knowledge they had to start doing realistic bidding, which means they now were not always the winner...

[EricKei]

That "extra charges thing at the end" thing sounds like Fraud to me, as well -- possibly even other violations (especially if the government or a large business with a good legal department was putting out the RFQs).

[wolfie]

Sort of like when I bought my first computer (286/12 - shows my age). I had previously bought a hard drive (30 MB RLL) for the family computer (8088/4.77), and this was going to be transferred to the new machine. I went around to a number of computer stores, and all the quotes were in the same ballpark. Got to another store, and their quote was around $200 more than all the others. I asked them why their quote was so much higher, so they brought out the itemized list of parts (I had parts lists from some of the other stores with me). Turns out the parts list they quoted me on included a 16 bit RLL controller that cost (drumroll please) aroud $200. The other stores didn't include that in their list (probably expected to use the existing 8 bit RLL controller). Guess where I bought my computer.

[Chromatix]

RLL is before my time, but I would guess it's from the pre-IDE era, so the controller card is connected more-or-less directly to the drive's spindle and seek motors, with all the "smart" logic being on the card, not the drive.

A 30MB drive would theoretically not be able to saturate even an 8-bit ISA bus, but that assumes the use of DMA for asynchronous I/O, which was an entirely foreign concept for PCs of the time. A 16-bit bus would presumably allow the PIO transfer to complete more quickly once each sector had been read, which could be a significant time saver for a sustained transfer.

[wolfie]

RLL is before my time, but I would guess it's from the pre-IDE era, so the controller card is connected more-or-less directly to the drive's spindle and seek motors, with all the "smart" logic being on the card, not the drive.

Yep, definitely pre-IDE. For those interested in computer trivia, RLL was a way to store 50% more data on a drive than could be done with standard MFM (modified frequency modulation - a method of encoding data). When reading data from a magnetic medium, long runs of the same value (0 or 1) are a problem, since the extended time between state transitions can confuse the read head. RLL (run length limited) gets around this by storing each byte as a 16 bit value, with only 256 of the possible 64k combinations (the ones which don't go too many bits between state transitions) being used. This allows data to be stored at 3x the density, but since each byte occupies 16 bits instead of 8, you only get 1.5x as much usable data storage.

A 30MB drive would theoretically not be able to saturate even an 8-bit ISA bus, but that assumes the use of DMA for asynchronous I/O, which was an entirely foreign concept for PCs of the time. A 16-bit bus would presumably allow the PIO transfer to complete more quickly once each sector had been read, which could be a significant time saver for a sustained transfer.

Just curious, but why would the capacity of the drive affect whether or not it could saturate a data bus? I would have thought that the data transfer rate, rather than the storage capacity, would be the key factor. Yep, way back in the early days of PCs, there were hard drives that could only hold 30 megabytes of data. At one point, it was even the maximum amount of storage that a single logical drive (i.e. accessed as a drive letter) could have under DOS. If you had a 60 megabyte drive, you'd need to set it up as two partitions (C: and D in order to use its full capacity. Later versions of DOS updated the FAT file system (by increasing the number of sectors in a cluster - still limited to 64k clusters) increased the maximum logical drive size to 512 megabytes, and later to 2 gigabytes. To go beyond 2G, you needed to go to FAT32 (file allocation table can handle up to 4G clusters).

[Captain Neon]

Auto Repair

I had an auto repair place pull that one on me when I brought a vehicle in for a brake job. They had my car in pieces, and my only options were to pay them to haul it to another shop, have them do the repair, or tell them that I didn't want the repair.

They took forever, and every other day, it was one thing after another.

"You should probably have an oil change. We can do that for you." "No, thanks. I did that myself less than 100 miles ago." The shiny new oil filter and transparent oil on the dipstick should have been tipped them off to that.

"Power antenna doesn't work. We can repair for ridiculous amount." "No, I don't want the power antenna. Radio doesn't work any ways." "We can replace the radio too for an obscene price." "No. Just get the power seat to work again so my wife can drive the car if need be."

"We took your car for a test drive. We noticed that the caliper is sticking. We have the caliper on the bench and confirmed that it sticks." Car in pieces. "Yeah, replace the caliper. I guess."

"We replaced the caliper and noticed that a rear wheel cylinder is leaking. It'll ruin the new shoes if you don't replace. We've got the wheel cylinder on the bench and have confirmed that it is really leaking." Car apart again. "Yes, I guess you better finish the job you started."

"We noticed that there's some slop in the tie rod ends. We should probably replace those too for too much money." "How many miles before it is out of specification?" "Maybe 20K?" "I drive this vehicle less than 2K/yr. I'll wait." "Are you sure?" "Yes, I'm sure. Will I be able to pick up tomorrow?" "Yeah, we think so."

"Hey, we took your car for another test drive, and noticed that the emergency brake cable is rusty and sticks. We've got it here on the bench and, yeah, its froze up." Car in pieces again. "Replace the cable, then. Will I be able to pick up today?" "Probably tomorrow."

Yeah. I told just about everyone what crooks they are. I even sent letters to their neighbouring businesses suggesting that shouldn't go there themselves or recommend them to their own customers. I guess that one really pissed them off. They had their lawyer send me a letter suggesting that they would sue if I bad-mouthed them any more. About the only thing I hadn't done by that point was distribute leaflets near his home and picket the store.

They are still in business. They run the tow truck in town, and have an impound lot. They obviously make a lot of money towing tourists in for repairs, and making locals decide how bad they want to keep their cars. "Yeah, police had us tow your car Friday night when the battery died. You can pick it up Monday from the impound lot. Tow and storage will be $1000. We will waive the storage, if you pay us $500 to replace the battery. Total will be $700 for tow and repair."