Sears Home Services Excessive labor charges, $264.27 for less than an hour., on riding lawnmower repair. San Antonio Texas

 This rebuttal from Jim-Aberdeen annoys me. First he pushes one of those service plans,which are generally not cost effective ,then compares Sears' labor charges to auto repair shop rates. Everyone knows the high regard in which auto repair shop are held, I expected better from Sears. I have a Craftsman LT 2000 garden tractor with a 20HP B&S engine. This summer it started dying after a few minutes. Start run die--start run die. Apparently this is a common problem with these engines, it's all over the internet, with no one solution.

The shade tree mechanics around me all diagnose it as a overheating magneto not delivering spark. Put on a new one--nope. The grass kept growing. I finally broke down and called Sears when it got to a half a foot. The girl says $70.00 service charge refundable if the repairs are actually made. A couple days later  two knuckleheads show up in a shiny new truck. Dirt in the gas tank,nope. Clogged fuel line,nope. Adjustments to the choke,nope.

Finally the older guy pulls the bowel off the bottom of the carb, drip,drip "hey you need a new carburetor". How much? Guy goes to the computer in the truck, $339.37. So $340 minus $70 service charge =$270. Hey it's not cheap, but I didn't want another magneto fiasco and the grass was getting higher. I told them to put it on. Swear to God the guy unscrewed two small nuts, slid back the clamp on the fuel hose, bing bang ten minutes later he's handing me a bill for the full amount. "Hey partner, mistake here, you didn't deduct the $70 service charge." He says"it don't work that way."

Me,"that's what they told me on the phone." He,"they told you wrong."She,(I'm on the phone with Sears),"well in a way we did deduct the service charge." "We didn't charge you a service charge." What??? "What's this $202.83 total labor,Carb Repl,it took them longer to unscrew the gas tank and empty out the little bit of dirt in the bottom and put it back on then it did to replace the carburetor. They didn't charge me for that?" "Because that's service,"she says,"service is we drive out to your house and find out what's wrong. Labor is when we fix it." "Miss when you preform labor for someone , isn't that a form of service?""No,no" she says,"big difference."

"Never mind, they were out here a total of 30 minutes tops, even prorated at a full hour how can you charge $200 bucks an hour. This is a lawn mower not a Ferrari." "We don't charge by the hour,we charge by the part and those rates are set by the home office." Geez I'm writin a book here. What the girl was really saying was Sears thinks if you're stupid enough to call Sears Home Services you are either mechanically ignorant or unfamiliar with this particular engine and how easy it is to swap out the carb. Then when the guy shows up and tells you he has to change the carburetor you'll think it's a big job and worth $200 bucks. Total,total scam.  

This just looks like another prime example of why I tell customers that the roughly $300 service plan makes sense. What you should have been told is that the house call is a $90 trip fee within X miles of the nearest store, plus mileage beyond that, plus labor charges pertaining to the actual repair, plus parts. This seems like a lot of pluses, but it covers everything. If the repair needed was wear related, the service plan that you apparently didn't get would have covered the repair and saved you money. As far as the labor charges that you have been billed for, remember that the service techs are given a list of prices for each repair that they have to do. If one repair "books" at being a 1.5 hour job and a second "books" at 1 hour, but the technician that sees you can do both simultaneously in half an hour, you are still charged for the 3.5 hours labor. This is nothing new, auto repair shops do the same thing. It just means that you were lucky enough to have a skilled technician, and therefore have a higher likelihood of there being no mistakes in the repair. Before anyone jumps on that last statement, let me clarify. Technicians, while being trained and skilled at what they do, are human, and therefore subject to the occasional mistake. More experienced and more highly skilled technicians just make those mistakes more infrequently than the rest.