Unemployment benefits story (sympathy or sob)

My cousin is a plumber. He makes six figures in most years.

He charges $200 an hour. $300 on weekends.

I asked him what percentage of his calls can be taken care of with a plunger that you can buy at any Wal-Mart.

He said 50-60 percent.

If he has 50 customers in a week and more than 25 of them happily pay $200 to have him do something that takes him a couple minutes to do, is that fair? He's professionally trained. He's supplying a service. If people think he's ripping them off, he'll lose business.

 

If people properly maintained their machines (cleaned them) and changed their water filters, 90% of my business would go away.

If they learned how to make a few simple repairs, that would be 50%. (But let's be honest, if they're not going to maintain the machine, they're unlikely to fix it themselves.)

These machines are expensive. They've been designed for idiots. Push a button, get a shot of espresso.

And, as Mizzou describes, I once paid Sears home service to come out and "fix" my dryer. He popped it open and removes a sock.

It took him two minutes. I think it cost me $200. If I had known how to pop it open, I could have fixed it, but I didn't. I do now. Won't be calling them again anytime soon.

 

Who makes that determination?

 

Sure, making $200 for 20 minutes of work sounds ridiculous. But if YF can do it, more power to him. He's earning that money.

What I don't like is people receiving money that they didn't earn. Such as newspaper CEOs.

 

If you know how to do something that most people can't do and you can make money doing that, I have nothing but respect for those people.

 

Sigh ...

 

I think what's throwing people here is that someone obviously spent more than $200 on a coffee maker to be willing to pay $200 to fix it.

 

Yeah, they're fixated on "coffee maker" as if it was a 4-cup Mr. Coffee or even a personal espresso machine that required a $10/minute repair. You can probably push past the $10,000 barrier for a restaurant-grade machine. Expensive things lead to expensive repairs.

 

What's throwing me is the idea that, even though both parties to the transaction are better off as a result of the transaction, there might be something unseemly about it.

 

Extortion

 

Laughing ...

 

You have to be just pushing buttons now.