[Closed] Stuff / services that cost way more than they should?

Is it just me or do others feel that they have no option but to pay what they feel is too much for jobs that need doing?

Not to sound grumpy for the 3rd time in a day..

Take off VAT

Mandatory Pension Contributions

Tools

Fuel

Cost of living increases

How has your charge out rate changed in the last few years?

What should those people earn? What is a base living wage where you live?

I was going to suggest whores but they are well cheap compared to your examples!

Out of interest how much did you expect either of those 2 jobs to cost?

How big was the hedge?

Marmite...always seems expensive to me

C&H!

😉

Size of hedge and stumps? It's the busiest time of year for a seasonal job so you will pay a premium. Get it done in the off season next time if you want to save money. Stump grinding is a specialist job requiring expensive machinery to be purchased or hired.

Agree it's hard finding tradespeople to do work though so maybe it doesn't pay well enough to encourage more people into these jobs?

How lung did the hedge take? If it was one man for a full day I think it might be a little bit pricey but not massively with the kit that he used.

Hedge sounds reasonable, just a decent garden shredder is over £100 to hire for a day. The rad move sounds way high though unless anything fancy was being done with the pipework - how long did it take the plumber?

Marmite…always seems expensive to me

Me too!

As I understand it, it is, or at least was a by product of beer production, but even the smallest pot seems to cost £3 now.

If you work for a company it can be very easy to become so detached from where the money is actually earned you find it hard to appreciate where self-employed tradesmen need to make theirs from.

I paid £170 for a man to walk around my house for 3 mins and calculate the the of type of RSJ I'd need to put in place of a supporting wall. He took another 5 mins to write it up.

Now that was expensive. I'm just jealous that I can't do that and work for 10 mins a day.

Is it just me or do others feel that they have no option but to pay what they feel is too much for jobs that need doing?

No it’s not just you.

Lots of people place unrealistically low values on other people’s jobs. And lots of people have no idea how much of the invoice price goes on running the business and tax.

Thankfully I am no longer self employed, so I don’t have to constantly explain to people why I can’t charge the rate they perceive me to be worth without being homeless and eating from food banks.

Well at least you own a house you lucky so and so. Us millenials will never have a chance to piss away 400 quid on a radiator!

I get paid < £200 per day. I get charged out at £1000 per day by the company I work for, more if away. Rates charged vs salary is quite a difference!

Petrol & Diesel

@thebrick

But you cost the company more than 200 a day to employ. Admittedly still definitely south of a grand. What do you do btw?

Sounds like you need a practical husband to deal with these little jobs around the house.

Coke and hookers are excellent VFM these days. (Although I think it's awkward attempting to measure the quality/purity of hookers)

And in charge out vs salary, you are not charged out every day normally, those costs add up when you are looking for work, generating business and doing all the non value add stuff.

Some serious research has gone into stoners charts. How long did it take you?

the wifes lip gloss £18 for 5ml 🤔

I get paid < £200 per day. I get charged out at £1000 per day by the company I work for, more if away

That's quite a mark-up. As a Chartered Civil Engineer my charge out rate was 3x salary in the UK, 6x in the Middle East.

As a software contractor I've looked into bespoke work and had people want me to develop nearly the equivalent of Amazon for £100.

That’s quite a mark-up. As a Chartered Civil Engineer my charge out rate was 3x salary in the UK, 6x in the Middle East.

Depends on what comes with the person for that.

Think I'm 6x here but that is consulting so a chunk of that time goes to getting the work too, then it covers the down time etc.

Lots of people place unrealistically low values on other people’s jobs. And lots of people have no idea how much of the invoice price goes on running the business and tax.

Exactly.  I think another factor is that goods and products have got relatively cheaper while labour prices have increased so people feel that the cost to have things done is too high.

But you cost the company more than 200 a day to employ. Admittedly still definitely south of a grand. What do you do btw?

Exactly, that is my point a lot of cost on top.

I am a software / controls engineer in a specialist industry. I am crap at negotiations but my work is very peak and troughs. I can have a week or more where I have nothing to do but be at work, but I still have to be paid so I think that explains a big part of the disparity. I should really go self employed split the difference and not have to do the sitting around part but it's mortgages that mean I am tided to PAYE at the moment.

And in charge out vs salary, you are not charged out every day normally, those costs add up when you are looking for work, generating business and doing all the non value add stuff.

Exactly, that is my point.  A lot of overhead and treading water time.

I find the cost of a brand new mid range full sus MTB quite surprisingly high, but I am comparing with prices from 20 years ago without accounting for inflation. If I scale it based on the cost of a pint it's quite cheap.

So yeah, the cost of a pint is surprisingly high. These days you're lucky if it's under £5. I remember £1 a pint in Curlers and the student unions. Maybe £1.50 if you weren't a student at Curlers.

 hookers are excellent VFM these days.

I dunno..!

Look at mike's breakdown of costs..

[i]

Take off VAT

Mandatory Pension Contributions

Tools

Fuel

Cost of living increases[/i]

Do they pay bloody VAT?

Have pensions!?

Outlay for tools? (Well, maybe)

Fuel? (bit of cake an a cuppa maybe)

Right rip off I reckon. Never spending out on them again!

I paid a couple of guys £240 to pressure wash my yard. Took them a couple of hours. I was well chuffed, meant I didn't need to find a rental pressure washer, lug it home, waste a weekend day doing it, get covered in crap, lug the washer back to the rental place, covering my car in shite...

I went riding instead, perfect.

Erm, so, not a service you thought cos way more than it should?

I paid £170 for a man to walk around my house for 3 mins and calculate the the of type of RSJ I’d need to put in place of a supporting wall. He took another 5 mins to write it up.

He knew the answer before he even turned up! They do so many wall removals, they know from your address what type of house it is, what the approx span is and could just tell you over the phone!

In defence of Structural Engineers I'm always surprised how cheap they are, I get full build designs for a few £100, which seems like good value to me.

Petrol & Diesel

I think its a Billy Bargain considering the infrastructure needed to extract raw materials, refine it, transport it, store and sell it and the fact it’s something like 65% tax in the uk.

£1.30 a litre for all that, some places have the bare faced cheek to charge more than that for water!

And in charge out vs salary, you are not charged out every day normally, those costs add up when you are looking for work, generating business and doing all the non value add stuff.

20 years ago when I worked for a massive Telco as a design engineer, our loaded rate (all in cost per staff member) was $120k pa. I was paid about £25k IIRC.

Train fares, unless they are "Advance" tickets and even then, some appear to be silly prices.

"Proper" hydraulic disc brake road bikes before end of season sales, with the very odd exception.

Center  Parcs often gets slated on here, but I've been tentatively looking at prices to stay in a B+B or a caravan for a few days near Dolgellau to do some fun hilly road riding including Bwlch Y Groes before the kids break up for summer, I've yet to see anywhere that wants less per bedroom than a CP villa Mar-Apr midweek outside kids holidays.

fact it’s something like 65% tax in the uk.

Exactly my point. Lob that off it and it’s reasonable IMO.

Should be about £.85ppl.

Exactly my point. Lob that off it and it’s reasonable IMO.

Should be about £.85ppl.

My 2p is that it’s got to come from somewhere and it’s one of those taxes you can legally avoid if you want.

Have to say, according to Stoner's charts, Tokyo looks great value for Hookers...

My wife took delivery of an £800 handbag yesterday. £800 on a chuffing bag. Apparently that was a good price.

I find the cost of a brand new mid range full sus MTB quite surprisingly high, but I am comparing with prices from 20 years ago without accounting for inflation. If I scale it based on the cost of a pint it’s quite cheap.

One fun thing to do is looking at old prices... Open All Hours is one I like.

Back in the 80's for example onions cost a lot lot less than peppers or meat.... but have soared in comparison whereas a bottle of bleach has hardly changed...?

Any high end bike bit shurly 🙂

Thing that gets me about paying for services, is that you pay for an hour of their time usually. Then the task is completed in about ten minutes.

On one hand maybe you should be happy with their efficiency, on the other you've paid their one hour minimum charge, you should be able to get them to do other stuff for you for the rest of the time they've charged you for.

Dentists. My wife just paid 2k for some remedial work after several years of NHS dentist messing up her mouth.

..and she needs more work!

Tradespeople recently I have had good value - they do something I cannot, quickly and to a better standard. I will not begrudge them earning a good daily rate - but then I now have folk I know costs/ish and trust.

Conveyancing solicitors however...

I paid £170 for a man to walk around my house for 3 mins and calculate the the of type of RSJ I’d need to put in place of a supporting wall. He took another 5 mins to write it up.

Unless he lived next door, it also took him time and money to get to your house and back. If he's professionally qualified, he also has to pay for PI insurance and keep his knowledge up to date. Although many people don't these days, he should have had his calculations checked by somebody else. If he used a computer, he had to buy that and the software. The £170 may have included 20% VAT. Your initial contact asking him to do the work also took some of his time, and it may have cost him to advertise his services.

I think its a Billy Bargain considering the infrastructure needed to extract raw materials,

Most of that infrastructure will have been in place for years though (cat crackers & all that) even though it does need maintaining. I used to be able to work out the raw cost of petrol after refining (I had a petrol station) It was pennies per gallon in 2000. You can no doubt find out how much it costs on the spot market if you know where to look. Lop the two lots of taxes off (duty & VAT) & hey presto, cheaper fuel.

One thing that pisses me off is what restaurants, pubs etc charge for some things, (wine's a good example) & people say 'well that's what you pay nowadays'. No, it's what you pay if you don't mind being ripped off.

I paid £170 for a man to walk around my house for 3 mins and calculate the the of type of RSJ I’d need to put in place of a supporting wall. He took another 5 mins to write it up.

INVOICE:

Time to visit and write up = £20

Knowing what to write, and being able to get it absolutely right based on training and experience = £150

The plumber sounded expensive compared to what I'd paid recently but if a) they are the only person you can get to do the job, b) they did it right and c) there's no way you could do it yourself then value for money doesn't come into it - there is no other choice!

I got 3 days work out of a plasterer for £420 and he said he was going to raise his prices - I actually agreed with him!

Things which are too much for what you get in my experience:

1) Traditional estate agents - why would i pay 4 times the price to someone who would do a worse job than the online company I used?

2) Leaseholding fees to freeholders (£400 for a letter!!!)

3) Vacuum cleaners. £400 for a crappy Dyson? They must have big windows at their head office.

One thing that pisses me off is what restaurants, pubs etc charge for some things, (wine’s a good example) & people say ‘well that’s what you pay nowadays’. No, it’s what you pay if you don’t mind being ripped off.

The mid market restaurant industry is having a crisis at the moment, too much supply and not enough demand. The only people making money are the landlords.....

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Sounds like you need a practical husband to deal with these little jobs around the house.

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Yeah, I think I agree (as does Mrs Z)!! 🙂

I take your points about taking into account what the tradespeople's outgoings are - but it still seems quite a lot to me.

The plumber told me it will take them 3-4 hours. The hedge took a day - was about 7 metres long.

Anyway, it's just a bit of a sting when I don't need it. Should cound myself lucky that we can at least afford to get it done while I'm out of action.

Those graphs were interesting.... 😉

Thing that gets me about paying for services, is that you pay for an hour of their time usually. Then the task is completed in about ten minutes.

You've also got to pay for the time that they didn't work for someone else. Unless your next door neighbour also needs some work doing then you can't expect not to pay for an hour, or even half a day.

I take your points about taking into account what the tradespeople’s outgoings are – but it still seems quite a lot to me.

So what does a day of your time cost?

It can seem expensive, but when you break it down £400/1 day hedge removal

1 day wages

Waste disposal costs

Drive to/from job

machinery costs-stump grinder and shredder, hire or purchase cost+maintenance (plus storage if purchased), fuel

van/van insurance/trailer

pension/holiday/sick pay

liability insurance

down time

ppe

quote cost/time

etc etc it is much more expensive to run a legitimate profitable business than DIY.

I still find it insane that we – as a species – have reached a point where we can extract oil, manipulate it into plastic, mould it into a detailed purpose-specific structure, ship it halfway round the world and deliver anywhere in a given nation, then stir our coffee with it and stick it in a bin.

Fizzy drinks must surely be up there.  A quid for a can of what is mostly water is having a laugh.  A 2L bottle of supermarket own-brand lemonade can be had for 17p, so someone somewhere is making a hell of a markup.

That's before you consider the draught stuff in pubs, too.  I used to work in a bowling alley in the early 90s, a large Coke Itspepsiisthatok which sold for like three quid cost just 7p in ingredients.  The little pots of ketchup that everyone used to piss and moan about not being given for free cost more to buy.

the cost of a pint is surprisingly high. These days you’re lucky if it’s under £5.

At my local I'd expect two pints for that.

One thing that pisses me off is what restaurants, pubs etc charge for some things, (wine’s a good example)

It's where they make their money though.  Choosing a restaurant, people look at the cost of a main meal when deciding where to eat.  No-one factors in the cost of the six pints of Kingfisher they've just washed down their chicken madras with.  (See also, my second paragraph.)

It’s where they make their money though.

and this is where it all comes back to... a business needs to make money to survive, they choose where they can and mark up some stuff and loss lead/cut margin on others.

A pub I know ran a steak night, great price for a pint and steak, quality of the meat was great, the owner said yep we just cut the price not the meat, so they make a loss on the food but get more footfall and more beer sales on a Tuesday night

A quid for a can of what is mostly water is having a laugh.

As is a quid for a bottle of what is entirely water that isn't as nice as the stuff that I get out of my tap for free.

Well quite.

The last bottle of water I bought, out of desperation, was £2 for 500ml.

Thing that gets me about paying for services, is that you pay for an hour of their time usually. Then the task is completed in about ten minutes.

We hear that in work sometimes, the problem is it's very hard to scale the hourly cost. Do you want the 20yo Techie with 2 years experience for £30 an hour, or the Guy who pre-dates the PC for £120 an hour? You'd spend more time trying to negotiate it all than you would fixing it.

So sometimes you get the kid who'll spend an hour fixing your problem, sometimes you get 'Super Techie' who'll take 10 mins for the same price.

It's not just that - sometimes it's difficult to predict how long a job will take, especially if it's fault-finding.  If I've not yet isolated a problem then estimating how long it will take is a crystal ball job.  Five minutes?  Three days?  Who knows, I've not found it yet.  Fixing it is usually the easy bit.

If I'm asked to do a server build at work, I quote a day's work (for the purposes of my time required to do the job rather than for invoicing).  It doesn't take anywhere near that long usually, but now and again some new hardware will come along where either the process has completely changed and I'll have to learn how to do it, or it'll fail in some bizarre manner that will necessitate troubleshooting and Google isn't always of much help with something brand new.  I'd rather allow myself a day and it only take half a day than the other way around.

You’ve also got to pay for the time that they didn’t work for someone else. Unless your next door neighbour also needs some work doing then you can’t expect not to pay for an hour, or even half a day.

Actually, I hadn't really thought of that, that they don't then have a job to go to until their next appt, so fair comment. But by the same token - if I call an emergency plumber to fix a leaking pipe and his minimum call out is one hour, and he then fixes it by tightening up a nut in 10 minutes..... should I be allowed then to say 'here, as I'm paying for another 50 minutes and the water's off already, can you change the washers in my upstairs taps and save me another call out?'

And actually - I wasn't even thinking about that situation either. It was Stoner's charts that made me think about my nuts getting tightened well before the hour was up 😉

the cost of a pint is surprisingly high. These days you’re lucky if it’s under £5.

I must be the world's luckiest person, can't recall paying £5 a pint.

It's anything from about £3-10 depending on what your drinking around here but then again, if it's quality and you measure it accordingly who cares, unless you have a mental block on x costing more than y etc.

Two pubs near us, for a pint of Timothy Taylors Landlord & a large glass of white wine one charges £11.90 & the other charges £7.80. Theyr'e less than 1.5 miles apart.

You can guess which one we go to! (& it's actually a better atmosphere than the other one)

As I understand it, it is, or at least was a by product of beer production, but even the smallest pot seems to cost £3 now.

That’ll be the craft Marmite version, then...

the cost of a pint is surprisingly high. These days you’re lucky if it’s under £5.

Possibly, in a club or music venue, or somewhere in London. Two pints of something like Pure Ubu will cost a bit over £8 for two pints in my regular pub in Corsham. Price depends on ABV.

Glasses frames are the ultimate rip-off, designer ones especially. £200 for a bit of metal & plastic that's probably made in a sweat shop.

I’m going to add window cleaners and gardeners, but not all of them.

we moved house a few years ago from a cheap one to a more expensive one in a nice street.

2 day later a well dressed ‘chap’ knocked on the door and presented himself as the local window cleaner. “Front and Back Sir, £20 a month” “oh” I said “how many times do you clean them a month?” “Oh just once”. The guy who did out last place only charged £3, we agreed to up it to £5 because my new house is older and taller.

A week later, ‘The Local Gardener’ knocks on the door “Front and back Sir, £25 a month” I’m was more inclided this time as a) I hate mowing b) it’s much more of a job c) bizarrely he does it every 3 weeks despite charging monthly. In the end I called one based a few miles up the road £10 every 3 weeks.

Add that to strange men with fake French accents trying to sell onions from around their neck (we’re 200 miles from Dover) and ‘Artists’ selling ‘one of a kind’ prints/posters for £500 and it seems there’s a bit of a scene tax to leafy middle class suburbs!

*full discloser, I’m still and always will be working class scum and we’re lording it up in a rented gaff belonging to a Mate who doesn’t want to rent it to strangers.

Glasses frames are the ultimate rip-off, designer ones especially. £200 for a bit of metal & plastic that’s probably made in a sweat shop.

The markup on lenses is much higher than frames.

Interesting read on the subject:  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/10/the-invisible-power-of-big-glasses-eyewear-industry-essilor-luxottica

Well quite.

The last bottle of water I bought, out of desperation, was £2 for 500ml.

This amuses me ... we extract oil, ship it round the world, refine it and deliver it to pumps slipping tax after tax and everyone complains about the cost and in the next breath buys water at £4/l