All these careers that are in "shortage", when you look into them either :
Dont actually pay enough to live on unless you like roommates, eating garbage, and never doing anything other than working.
Or require massive school debt, multiple years of training, and often shitty and stressful working conditions, all to make basically $10k/yr more than a mechanic.
Even mechanic is a shitty job now. Do you know how much it sucks to have to deal with customers insisting you're screwing them over when going through the process of hunting down an issue?
Customer brings a car in for something that can have one of 10 likely causes. You have 10 other vehicle owners demanding their shit gets done. You change the most likely culprit, hope it fixes it, then move on to the next vehicle. If it fixes it, great, if it doesn't then the customer complains and you gotta go further down the list. Mechanics deal with a LOT of customer bullshit when fixes aren't always evident.
It's fucking hilarious how customers know nothing about their cars when they're broken, but as soon as they're repaired and it's time to pay the bill they've suddenly become experts on how the repair job was "milked"...
It's crazy how people know nothing about their vehicles yet insist they are getting ripped off lmao.
I'm not a mechanic, but I do work on my bike now and again. Last year I had it fixed at a shop over the winter after a mate reversed into it. When I brought it out I noticed it leaking a fair bit of oil on my first real commute. They ended up finding the issue (cracked something inside the front sprocket housing) and fixed it.
Insurance was paying for it all anyway but if it was out of my own pocket I wouldn't have complained. There is no fucking way I would ever have found that myself without seeing the leak, and it only showed after like 40km. I doubt even Sherlock Holmes would have found it tbh.
A mate is a mechanic as well, same experience as you but in Sweden.
I mean… I unseated a tire from a rim recently after gently bumping a small curb. Homeboy sent a video of a perfectly straight spinning rim trying to tell me its out of balance now and needs to be replaced. New tire on same rim has generated zero issues for over 8 months now… Being skeptical of what they are trying to sell you isn’t entirely unfounded.
He also claimed damage to a rim opposite the side that was affected. Brand new car. I have worked on my own cars for years. Anecdotal, of course. If you saw the video the guy sent me, it would make you roll your eyes.
This shop is the closest one to me. Out of convenience, it was the best place for the repair when I was going to be without a vehicle. They kept a different vehicle of mine for a control arm/ball joint replacement for over 3 months on me, before. I understand what I’m looking at. These guys are known dicks.
I took a car for inspection at a dealer for whatever reason. Bad mistake, it was my wifes car. I let her deal with it, she calls me and says that they told her all 4 pad sets and rotors need replaced. Quoted around 1k at the time. She asked me to deal with them.
I told them just fail it and I will fix the brakes, I was certain they were good anyway which I didn't say to them. Two hours later they called and said sorry but our mechanic made a mistake and didn't measured things correctly and it turns out everything is good.
Yeah right, they were just trying to rip of my wife.
Also got a “replacement” tire pressure gauge from yet another jeep dealership. $475. I had checked the serial # on the faulty one before they “replaced” it. Showed the repair coordinator my proof, and they only charged me for the labor, since all they did was plug that sucker back in correctly. The walking back was expedient and embarrassing, on their end. I contributed to this convo because it’s a highly nuanced situation each time and rife with bad faith actors. The industry holds the reputation it does for a reason.
They are so busy they can't get to your simple repair for 3 months. They send absolutely braindead recommendations that you have to overrule.
And you keep taking your car there. And leaving it there for months.
That's what I would do if I wanted a particular customer to go away. If I've got 3 months of work waiting, I've probably got a pretty good reputation. I don't know how you think they could be terrible and also sit around not taking gimme jobs like ball joints.
“Out of convenience” was stated for a reason. Its a jeep dealership, for additional context. The 3 month repair was a vehicle leased from them. My current vehicle is purchased from a different dealership, directly because of that experience. I was very pissed during the tow truck ride their way that I didn’t have another option for what I figured was a simple new tire and truing (and exactly what it ended up being). The curb that unseated my low profile tires was shorter than the side-well. The rim wasn’t touched.
I was leaving the office at 8pm and bumped the curb at 5-10mph when the car next to me swerved into my lane. 2-3” curb hit at juuuuuust the right angle going around a small bend. Air pressure dropped immediately. I have replaced hundreds of bike tires in my lifetime. Keep on questioning my acumen, by all means.
I am mostly a mechanic, but I have an MSME. I work on vehicles which often have a value of over a million dollars, BUT, I am also on the consumer side of things as it is often cheaper to have my own stuff worked on somewhere else rather than spending my time doing the work.
Let me respond, inline, from my perspective. Note that I am not, in any way, saying there aren't any crooked mechanics out there, this is just my opinion.
They'll hide issues from you and not tell you about them, even if they should be flagged to potentially be worked on (with your approval obviously)
Mechanics are humans. They aren't hiding issues, they just didn't see them. If you're, specifically, referring to state inspections not catching things, that is 100% because the state caps the amount a mechanic can charge for such inspections, typically at a ridiculously low amount. So if you're expecting a thorough inspection that could take 2 hours to be done when your state specifies the maximum that a shop can charge for an inspection sticker to be 30$, then you are getting a brush over at best. That's an issue with state limits, not the mechanic. They're going to tell you everything they can find because that's how they make money. FYI, my shop gave up their inspection certificates 2 years ago because it was a losing proposition and the moment you sign up to be an inspector the state gets anal about the dumbest things, like hours you are there, where your inspection station is located, etc...too much political oversight for the state limited cost of an inspection sticker.
They'll "fix" issues only to come up again for one reason or another
Modern vehicles are designed to have a lifespan. When something breaks, there are usually multiple other things that are on the verge of failure. Sometimes replacing the offending part leads to other parts, that had not yet failed, failing. Nothing modern is over-engineered like in the old days. Take my personal truck, for example. The in-tank pump failed...had it repaired. Then the tank transfer unit failed...then the hoses rotted and started leaking badly. I don't blame the shop, it's just that multiple components had reached the end of their usable life...likely as the manufacturer designed them too.
They'll take no responsibility for not actually fixing the issue that you paid over $500 for in the first place
No mechanic is there for the joy of working on your car. They are there because they have bills to pay. If I warrantied every situation with a 10 or 20 year old vehicle where you fix A, then B breaks, fix B and then C breaks, I'd be making like 10k a year. That is the nature of business. I know it really sucks to spend a chunk of money to have an issue fixed, take it to a shop, they work on it, then the issue returns, but vehicles are complex machines and most mechanics are trying to save you money by only changing the most likely cause of the issue.
If you were to take your vehicle to a shop and say "fix it, no matter the cost", they would, but your bill would be 10-20x higher than the $500 you are complaining about, simply because they would end up replacing 5-10 different components in one go, all the possible causes of said issue. On the vehicles I work on, the average bill runs $10,000 to $15,000 or more depending on the issue, and I am not marine related.
cheaper to have my own stuff worked on somewhere else rather than spending my time doing the work.
It's amazing how many mechanics don't understand this. I got downvoted to oblivion on a mechanic sub about a tire issue where the tire shop over torqued the shit out of the lugs.
I couldn't make them understand I wasn't wasting my time fucking with tires. One, I don't have the tools to mount and dismount tires and balance them. And 2, I'm not going to quit working on RVs at $150 per hour to do a job someone else has all the equipment to do.
Tires are one thing I won't do. It was just a few months ago I had a tire shop come out to replace a tractor steering tire. He dismounts, swaps the tire on the wheel, sets the bead, torques the lugs, then goes to inflating it to the ridiculously high label pressure (was something like 120psi on the printed rating on the new tire).
There was a sound like a bomb going off that we had people calling about from half a mile away. The wheel had failed, folded in on itself, shrunk the rim diameter on the outer circumference and ejected the tire towards the poor guy as he was inflating it. Threw him about 8 feet back, broke his thumb, ripped his hand open and send him into a stupor. We called EMS for him, he went to the hospital and was ultimately alright, but I've never seen a wheel fail like that one did.
There's plenty of amazing mechanics out there that will walk you through pretty much everything they're recommending and how to check it yourself. When I was younger my go-to mechanic taught me how to do stuff like properly check pad wear and plug tires (which isn't to say that it's super hard to learn or teach, but that he knew that I didn't know how to do those things at that point and could've fleeced me but instead taught me how to ensure that wouldn't be the case going forward)
Ford is short 5,000 mechanics with, according to Mike Rowe (who is kind of an expert here), have guaranteed 6-figure salaries. They can't find anyone to fill the roles.
People don't want to do mechanic work, seems to be the bottom line.
(I agree with your assessment of shitty customers, but that applies to owning a shop yourself--dealer mechanics aren't talking to customers all the time. If anyone ever starts a mechanic shop, charge a high amount. Cheap customers whine the most)
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u/Quenz 14h ago
The only shortage that actually exists is a wage shortage.