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.....
<div class="bbp-reply-author">bedmaker
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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
