Prices

Low Price Guarantee

There are a lot of good shops around and unless the job is someone's "drawing card" or they don't employ qualified technicians, we all usually charge roughly the same price. But to put your mind at ease we do offer a low price guarantee:

If you bring us a written estimate from a reputable repair shop we will match their price AND give you $10 off for the trouble of getting their written estimate (on a $100 or more service). And in most cases you still get our 3 year parts AND LABOR warranty!

We try to make our prices fair and competitive, and the price match guarantee assures you of that. But price isn't everything. In fact it's only half of what makes for true value.

Everyone has to make a living, and we charge about the same as other shops. Whether it's a small independent or a large chain or dealership, we all juggle parts mark up, labor rates, specials and package pricing in some way in order to stay in business.

Parts Prices. Repair shops have to make a profit on the parts to stay in business, that is normal in this industry. CarScope used to mark up parts about the same as everyone else but now we charge you our cost for the parts and make that profit on the labor side.

Labor Rates. The labor rate should not be a major consideration when choosing a shop because you can't really tell by looking at the labor rate who is going to be the least expensive overall or who will take the best care of you. Even if a labor rate is lower, the shop might charge more hours than the one with the higher rate or might charge more for the parts or do some work that isn't needed at all, etc., etc..

Price Comparisons. Price shopping works for buying a TV set - comparing the same brand set at different stores, you know which is the better buy. But when it comes to service work, what may appear to be a simple comparison can be more complicated than it looks. We wrote a brochure about it years ago, we called it "Lowballs" . It gives the details, but the main points are below:

Your real savings come from knowing that we only do what you need and we do it right.

We will cut corners and save you money ONLY where it is safe and wise to do so.

We take the time to explain all your options so you can make the best repair and maintenance decisions for your vehicles.

The "blah blah blah" on Labor Rates

In case you haven't gotten bored yet, here's some more info about our pricing structure and why we think it is better for both you and us. We no longer use a conventional labor rate. We figure our parts profit into the labor so we can give you the parts at our cost. This works very well with our membership plan that can really help your budget.

Because of this method you can't really compare our labor rate with someone else's, you have to compare the total cost of the job and we guarantee our price will be the same or less! Like we said above, comparing labor rates or even "total job" prices isn't really a good way to find the best value anyway, there are so many other factors that are more important.

Why use an unconventional pricing structure?

Parts profit is a significant and needed part of every repair shop’s income, so parts mark up has to be very high. Most of the national chains, if not all of them, do not do major work or difficult diagnoses because in many different ways these types of jobs are not as profitable. One significant way doing smaller jobs lets you make more profit is that you are installing more parts per hour that your techs are working so the shop gets to enjoy the high parts profit on the higher volume of parts you sell.

We want to be able to serve you and help you no matter what problem your vehicles have, so we continue to do major work and in depth diagnoses and have worked out this pricing method that puts the needed parts profit on the labor side so we only charge you our cost for the parts. This does a few things: it saves you on sales tax (there is no tax on labor) and it allows us to make the needed profit on larger jobs (that are normally less profitable) and at the same time saves you money on the more common smaller and medium sized repairs. We've created this system so that it costs you about the same overall, and when worked in conjunction with our Repair Membership can be a real help to your budget!

I can't emphasize enough, even though our prices are guaranteed to be competitive, the price is not the most important "value factor" in choosing a repair shop. We see a lot of "horror stories" from people leaning too heavily on price.