The-Snowman:
Rjan:
What a howler Snowman, considering that earlier you said you couldn’t be bothered to read my post to you.
I didnt read yours because I said it would be the same stuff ive read earlier NOT that I thought it wasnt worthy of my time to read. There’s a difference
Ive told you all this umpteen times before but here it is one more time since you dont seem to be listening.
Most of these guys contacted ME.
I obviously have been listening because I addressed you on this point specifically in my previous post. The only person between us not listening is you.
I put ads on sites where they read it and decide its something they can do. I didnt tell them what I was willing to pay. I have no idea what the job costs. I needed quotes to work it out from there. I dont feel comfortable talking to guys on the phone about stuff like this. My hearing isnt the greatest and I miss a lot of stuff if I cant see the person face to face. For the roof job in particular, I need to know how they are going to do it, what materials,level of guarantee etc etc. You might be happy trying to do it on the phone but if I pick him up wrong and then he arrives to do the job and im not happy with the way he’s doing it, its too late once he’s started drilling holes or ripping tiles up.
Which all seems plausible at first, except that you are clearly sophisticated enough to use email and express yourself in writing (not to mention lodging an advert on some sort of trade site).
You are also clearly not in a rush, so I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to take the very roughest of measurements and talk about a ball-park price before proceeding to a full survey.
I also don’t see why, if you feel you need a full survey, you don’t just ask and offer to pay separately for the call-out (irrespective of whether you hire the surveyor to complete the main work).
At the very least we could end up at loggerheads as he gets told the jobs off and he feels ive wasted his time so id rather speak face to face.
But if he comes for a chat and you don’t like the cut of his jib, you’ve wasted his time anyway just doing that. And if the guy has to abide by your standards of timekeeping (where you refuse to just wait to take your turn in the sequence of tasks he has that day), then he’s quite possibly wasted several useful hours.
I think its terrible they dont want to come out to quote a job but I agree with you. They dont have to. Its my personal choice not to use that company because of it, but surely you can agree my reasons for it are valid for me personally, even if you dont agree with them yourself?
I don’t think a survey is necessarily an invalid request. It’s just that the time taken to do it has to be balanced against the cost of it (rather than just paying extra if extra work is found to be needed).
I also don’t disagree that it’s nice to get the measure of a person. But again, that has to be balanced against the cost of it - no sensible person pays 10 call out fees just to get a look at the tradesman.
Amongst the manifold ways you veer into unreasonableness, though, is for example in expecting several traders to each bear the cost of surveying your premises and his “job interview” with you, even before you have committed to him or disclosed what you are expecting to pay (which might allow them to rule themselves out before even proceeding to the time-consuming survey and “interview”).
Now, having agreed to come out, its got nothing to do with economic reasons or profit to cost ration if he is a no show. Its just poor service and rude.
On that I agree, although a few no-show odd-job men doesn’t even begin to justify your slandering of the British work ethic. The fact that you have oddball views more generally, and that you came into contact with these would-be tradesmen in an unconventional way (i.e. by advertising your work, rather than by calling an established tradesman who advertises his services), and that you paid a pittance for the work (and never apparently expected to pay a great deal more than you did for the painting work), also doesn’t help your case.
As for the actual cost, ive said to you a few times, its not the cheapest quote im looking for. Its nothing to do with economic difference. These guys agreed to come out and can price the job however they see fit. They wouldnt have called me if they didnt think it was worth their time. Its the guy i think is best for the job and who I trust with my investment. Ive had quotes ranging from £800 right up to £2700. Im going with one of the guys who quoted £2K because I trusted him, after he answered all my questions to my satisfaction.
I don’t want to get into discussing the precise details of another scenario which you continue to drip-feed. I never said you were going for the cheapest to the exclusion of any other factor. What I am saying is that you can’t expect to pay £360 for a week’s painting work, and find an abundance of painters in the market who you expect to be not just competent painters but competent self-employed businessmen.
Given the circumstances (in which you advertised your work), many who approached you may not even be businessmen - they may be employed painters who are out of work or underemployed, and have no prior experience of planning their work, managing their time, and keeping track of their customers and appointments.
You keep saying its acceptable to turn up an hour late without a phone call to let me know. Sorry, but that will never be acceptable to me or any right minded person. No decent person has an issue if someone is running late but it take 20 seconds to let someone know and at the very least, its good manners and business practice.
No, courtesy calls don’t take 20 seconds, they require work durations to be estimated, they require keeping track of time closely, and if the deadline for the courtesy call falls during another task then they require that task to be stopped and concentration to be switched - and if you’re already up a ladder with dirty hands, you might need to get down, possibly wash your hands, and get your diary from the van to get the customer’s details. The interrupted task (unless it is very straightforward and overlearned) will then proceed at a fraction of the previous speed, with less reliability, and will exacerbate the delay further. Then any customer after you has to be called too.
Obviously there is a balance to be struck between how much of the traders time can be reasonably wasted versus how much of the customer’s, but it is my opinion that around 60 minutes margin is what can be reasonably expected to be allowed, and that even a call to cancel the appointment may occur after the actual appointment time.
Of course, there is nothing to stop the customer calling the trader before 60 minutes to confirm attendance.
Do you think I have nothnig else to do other than sit around waiting on a tradesman all day? They’re not the only ones trying to run a business. I work from home and I run a business as well and I dont have time to sit around waiting, wondering when, or even if, someone will turn up.
You don’t have to sit around. If the trader is substantially late, you can call him to cancel, or simply leave the house.
Or if you work at home, you can get on with work until he arrives.
Or if you feel this would be too much disturbance, then you know exactly what I’m talking about when I point out that keeping track of time and making a courtesy phone call can be a serious disturbance to the trader concentrating on his ongoing task.
The ultimate solution, if either person is not to wait on the other, is for work to be carefully planned and estimated, and for margins to be built into a schedule, but that requires experience, it requires competence in those organisational tasks, it requires the market to sustain experienced traders, and it requires idle time to be remunerated, and ultimately that brings us back around again to my point about the prices that customers can afford and are willing to pay.
If you can pay, and don’t want to wait around, then you open the Yellow Pages, engage an established and insured business, who will provide references and cater to your demands, and pay the rates that they demand. If you scrabble around at the bottom of the market, the gross consumption of your time is the price you pay anyway.
These last two pages started because chainsaw was blaming foreigners for taking jobs about from british youngsters.
Our politicians and/or the unregulated market mechanism are to blame, but it is true that foreigners are enabling (which is different to being “to blame for”) a freefall in market prices and are masking the fact that so few settled workers are being drawn into the market (whether through low rates, lack of training, etc.).
Those settled would-be workers directly deprived of their incomes or the opportunities in our economy, are therefore bearing the full cost of free movement of labour directly on their shoulders - when the benefits of free movement is something that only accrues more subtly to our society as a whole. That situation, of a smallish number of already low-paid workers bearing severe economic costs for a collective benefit, is a deeply uncivilised (and indeed decivilising) political policy.
All ive been saying from the start is its not the foreigners who are all to blame. There are plenty british tradesman who are damaging the industry. Without some of the foreigners, people like me wouldnt get any work done because the British guys with the industry to themselves would be even more unreliable and if standards keep dropping the way they have over the last ten years then there wont be an industry for the youngsers to use.
Without immigrants (or in a market with regulated prices), it is reasonable to think that you’d either pay the proper rate for that work (according to the real cost of labour in our society), or you wouldn’t have the work done. Obviously, houses need to be maintained, so it is likely that the work would still be done at the higher rate - if necessary, by householders starting to replace paintwork with plastics, or by using more durable paints and woods, or by larger companies setting up to do the work more efficiently than the real cost of having so many one-man-bands doing it.
Please tell me you can at least see my points regarding the level of service given.
I can certainly see some of your points. I just disagree on the extent of their significance, or on where you locate their causes.
I agree with some of yours regarding quoting and to a certain extent,the pricing. Not as much as you but I agree, some foreigners can keep costs really low due to paying lower wages to guys who reside in their own country most of the time so dont need to earn as much. Like you and CS, I dont agree with these guys and yes, they are damaging the industries they work in for British guys. However, it is not the fault of every foreigner who comes here that the industry is on its arse and its not fair on the ones who are miles better than their British counterparts to say it is. I often wonder how many unreliable and poor tradesmen use the foreigners as an excuse for their business struggling or going down the swanny. People like chainsaw give them all the ammunition they need and that is what irritates me
But lets just agree to disagree. Surely,like me,(and probably everyone else!) you’re fed up going round and round in circles and repeating yourself. I dont think we’ll see eye to eye but we were having (in my opinion anyway) a reasonable if slightly tetchy and heated debate but now chainsaw has waded in, I can only see it going one way and that’s downhill rapidly.
One other thing I will say is though that this forum has been dull as hell for a while now and been pretty boring so thanks for sticking to your guns and keeping coming back with more and not giving up after a couple of posts.
Well rest assured I never get fed up of these issues. I don’t myself blame foreigners, I blame free markets - you can’t support free markets, and then complain that the market has given the wrong verdict on wages. Foreigners are hardly at the root of every social issue we have, but free markets and the ideology which supports free markets are, because free markets were only ever designed to be an attack on the working class and an attack on civilised society. It’s only now it’s gobbling up middle class professionals (like doctors and lawyers), and causing global crises, that the powerful are peddling back, but if we’re not careful the powerful will peddle us back into the logic of European disintegration and world wars, and solve the discontent of the working class by sending them to the fronts to kill each other again!
) There quotes were very competitive and were around what I expected. Nothing major but jobs I couldn’t be bothered doing.
they had obviously done this before because it was like an orchestra working together. The trees came down in sections and landed exactly where the lad on the ground said they would, then moved instantly to the shredder jobby.
