Auto shop business practices
One of the best days I had while owning my shops was when I had a customer bring his truck in for a noise under hood. Had one of my tech look at it and it needed a water pump. He was out of work at that and needed to save some money, so I printed out the steps for him to do the water pump and sent him on his way. The next day I see him pull in in his wifes car. He comes in and laughs that he has heard of this but never believed that the shops were being honest, he drove his truck home, pulled it into the garage, struggled through the replacement, fill the system and tries to start his truck. It would not run because the fuel pump refused to run. We towed it in and checked and sure enough had power and ground but the pump would not run. Sometimes stuff does happen
Exactly.
And if it had been your shop doing the work, not the customer you helped out by assisting him in doing his own work when the fuel pump went bad at the same time the water pump had been replaced you'd now be the subject of the OP.
As a shop owner I can see both sides of the issue here. I've been in the situation as the guy who's tested everything out, seen the radiator leak, ('cause it's the bigger leak and closer to the pressure tester) and recommended a new radiator, then tried to fill and bleed the system, only to have it keep popping air because there's another leak that didn't show up doing the system test or, no matter how hard I looked for other signs of leakage, something was hidden and I couldn't see evidence of another leak.
Me being me, though, I hardly ever charge full price because I missed something. Truthfully, I hate making the phone call saying that I f***ed up. But that's what it is: human error. And since I hate making that phone call I try to be as thorough as I possibly can be.
I've been on the other side, too. I've had stuff brought to me where someone else has worked on it before and made an obvious error in diagnostics and tried to charge to cover their mistakes. It puts me in a difficult situation. Because I've been in the situation where I've had a bad day and my head might not be in ballgame. I hate to bad mouth someone else in front of a customer. Again, human error can to blame. Or, it can also be skill set in the other shop. I don't work in the other shop, so I can't say.
That being said, there are shops out there who are out to empty the customers' pockets of every penny when they walk in the door. They have the attitude that if they only see a customer once they're going to get every penny they can just that once. Never been able to understand that mindset. I'd rather have a steady customer base with good referrals than just to see one and done.