I think some of the problem is the unbalance in our society. Remember hanging around a repair shop waiting for an alignment on our company's truck. The owner of the shop was talking with the guy in front of me who had a Pontiac Trans AM. Seems they were attacking a problem that had been with the car since new. The shop owner explained factors in the issues he had been having. First was when he bought the car, it was about the time the owner of the local Pontiac dealer was getting ready to retire, the last 2 or 3 years he ran the dealer his only interest was to scoop up as much money as he could. Another problem is they were fixing something that hadn't been done right on the line so you have someone making $18 to $20 dollars on hour on the line (this was a long time ago) who couldn't/wouldn't do their job and then someone at the dealer making $7.00 to $8.00 flat rate having to fix it. The flat rate warranty only paid to repair but wouldn't pay to diagnose. Additionally we have Pontiac (GM) trying to be "thrifty" with the claim, often screwing over the dealer on the warranty claim. Take the previous example someone cited about a cross-fire Camaro, it was probably wrong from the factory and GMs answer aided by the dealer was for the owner to live with it. And there is a good chance the owner went back and bought another GM car. So GM and the dealer really didn't have any repercussions from not providing the goods & services they sold with the Camaro. More and more that is changing and that's why we have seen an increase in other non-big three automobiles here in the USA.
So if you had reasonable intelligence and were looking to start a career and make yourself a living where would you go? Unskilled at GM for $20 OR Skilled at the local dealer for $8.00 and have to fight to get that? Business and cars and about anything else has gotten so darn complex it requires different skill sets to do both well. 40-50 years ago a guy with some mechanical skills could get into the repair business with a reasonable investment, run the business and fix stuff. As I said before with tax codes and OSHA, and the EPA it takes one person just to run the business, so we add employees to the mix so now we can add labor law, benefits, family leave and hiring and firing to the mix, still haven't dealt with the actual task of fixing cars. The complexity of the cars requires MORE tools and knowledge which equates to more money. As we talked earlier the manufacturers don't want to pay market value for this service, the dealers don't want to pay market value for the labor and guess what the customer/owner doesn't want to pay market value either.
There are some changes occurring in business, some business leaders are focusing more on optimizing their results and accept that the employees are an integral part of keeping customers. Retaining customers is often cheaper than trying to get new ones, and once you have a good relationship their might be more potential for profit. More and more businesses, including big ones are finding out a "take it or leave it" attitude is basically telling the customer to go somewhere else. Still maybe don't understand the effect of wages ans quality and so much of our entitlement attitude or Union attitude has separated the quality/quantity of production from the money earned for producing the good or service.
Bottom line is we are losing a lot of talent because we don't feel we need it anymore, so there isn't a reward for developing those skills. The said part is that belief might only be partially true, we are losing some capabilities we'll need and want.
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Today's Featured Article - Listening to Your Tractor - by Curtis Von Fange. Years ago there was a TV show about a talking car. Unless you are from another planet, physically or otherwise, I don’t think our internal combustion buddies will talk and tell us their problems. But, on the other hand, there is a secret language that our mechanical companions readily do speak. It is an interesting form of communication that involves all the senses of the listener. In this series we are going to investigate and learn the basic rudimentary skills of understanding this lingo.
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