What a Scam!

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Maybe by claiming that the parts have an extreme value, they can leverage warranty work by being able to write off these high part prices as business losses on their taxes.

legislation,

this

Seams that the sum of all individual parts prices should never exceed the price of a complete item. IOW, I should be able to buy all the individual pieces of a complete car engine from GM for less than a new crate motor costs. All the individual pieces of a car should cost less than a built car, shouldn't they? It seems to me like the makings of a reasonable fair trade law that could end this abuse of the customer.

Auto manufacturers have gotten ridiculous with this stuff. I had to buy some steel pickup tubes for a Camaro fuel tank. All because the fuel level sending unit was welded to the tubes and couldn't be purchased as a seperate part. It only cost $600.00 for a few feet of cleverly built soft steel tubing and a sending unit. After looking at the quality of the sending unit, I'm afraid to think that it actually has electricity flowing thru it.

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Price a plastic radiator fan for an auto (no motor). Molded price ex factory? Less than $1. Your price? $50+

N

Many years ago I was doing some work for a copper mine in Chile that involved (among other things) a review of all 35,000 spare parts held to identify duplications, upgrade descriptions and part numbers etc. I came across a "battery charger repair kit" for a common peice of earth moving equipment. When looking at the kit I noticed that some of the items in the were also held as discrete spares. A little investigation showed that, in fact, all of the kitted items were also stocked individually. I cannot remember why, but I located all the pricing for the individual parts and compared it to the kit and found that my client was being charged USD$483 for the plastic bag, ie the kit was $483 more than the sum of the individual prices.

Wayne McDermott

Don't forget they had to pay the monkey that put the parts in the bag!

N

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They price it so high so that nobody buys them and they don't have to deal with having authorized shops stock them. You can get the part if you

*really* need it, but there's no demand so people just buy new units, exactly as planned.

What about the cost of packing them as individual parts, cataloging them, shipping, sorting and stocking them individually? None of this is nessesary if the whole thing is bought assembled.

It is like that for everything when you look at the true cost of the part itself. They manufactures have high administration and operations costs. If something is not moving very fast off the shelves, then its effective cost is higher.

You also have to consider that when you are servicing your own devices, the labour is actually very expensive. A very good skilled tech has to be paid at least $20 US or more per hour. To operate a business, you would have to charge enough on top to have the operating costs, taxes phones, a vehicle, utilities, and administration costs also to be paid. This is why many of the service centres are charging more than $50 per hour to work on appliances, and home electronics. If you look at the total operating costs for a typical business, there has to be a fair amount of money coming in, or they would have to close down.

As for the low to medium end CD players and VCR's very few people are servicing them. The cost for the labour alone, is just too high to make it worth it. For the low end units, many of the manufactures are no longer supplying or stocking replacement parts. It just does not pay.

As for legislation to make price control, this will never happen in our society. If this starts, this will be the downfall of the way we live. There is the aspect of price and demand. If a company starts to charge too high, they will find that they will not be in business much longer.

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Jerry G. ======

Have you ever worked in manufacturing? I worked as a production and engineering test tech. Lets say I needed a 0805 SMD resistor. Our cost was a little over 1 cent. On the other hand the paperwork and time to look up the part number, request the part, have it pulled from the stockroom and get it to my bench was over $5.00. I finally got permission to get these parts 100 at a time to reduce overhead. I used a lot of SMD resistors, so I had over 100 different values of 1% & .1% resistors on my bench, along with common SMD ICs and a few crystals.

In other words, you have to live it to understand it. You are asking for a very fragile and expensive part that wouldn't be sold every day if it was five dollars. It needs special handling at all stages and a lot of administrative costs, not to mention outrageous taxes on spare parts inventory. Why do you think companies in the US try to use the lousy J.I.T. system? It looks good in theory, but leads to shortages and no spare parts.

The additional costs for spare parts doesn't bother the government because they are just giving back the taxes you paid, along with the cost of the part.

It isn't worth 2 cents.

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

I was told this indirectly but it explained the astronomic parts costs for the company involved ( scope manufacture ). At a regular review period, annually or two-yearly I don't remember, they would divide the parts stock in 2 , sell off at auction one half and double the price of the remainder.

electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

I realize that you have to have a certain amount of markup, to conpensate for such expenses. But I think that mfrs could probably sell replacement parts at much lower prices, and still make a decent profit. As someone else implied, they simply want to make their products unprofitable to service - and I still think that's the primary reason for such costly replacement parts.

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These days the way they can pack things by machine and do it all in China it does not cost that much to stock parts . The bottom line is they dont sell those high priced DVD lazers on porpose and dont even have them in stock because after a 200$ quote anyone would go buy a whole new player for 45$ . If someone is dumb enough to pay 200$ for one of those can get it .. One of the workers at the plant in China holds a coffee cup under the lazer pooping machine & catches one , chucks it in a box & off it goes .

My .02. The high cost of replacement printer cartridges; compared to initial cost of a printer. Does not compute!

initial

Ink jet ink costs much more per ml than the finest vintage wine.

N

There exists legislation that manufacturers must stock spare parts for out of production equipment for seven years (or some length of time like that.) This was enacted in the 80s in response to consumer complaints that manufacturers were gouging consumers by forcing them to buy new models when a spare part costing a few dollars would have kept the equipment chugging along fine for a few more years. The manufacturer's work around to comply with the law was to make replacement parts prohibitively expensive. Of course original equipment is so inexpensive these days that repairs are never worth the time and effort even if one has the inclination to tinker.

If this was ever true, it isn't anymore. The manufacturers are only required to support their product for the duration of the stated warranty, and this can include factory-only repair or just exchanging with a like or "equivalent" product. (How many computer monitors are imported with NO spare parts?)

Company policy and market forces are all that determine parts cost and availability. Certainly laser pickups are overpriced as a rule, but this just means the companies in question aren't interested in selling parts out of warranty, but still stock them (or previously did) for warranty repairs. Eventually they'll sell them in bulk to MCM or somebody else.

Mark Z.

Where exactly is this legislation found? Enacted in the 80s?

Leonard

Hell, I ended up paying $300 for a heater blower motor for my car when it went south - couldn't find any in the local boneyards. An el-cheapo motor worth about 15 bucks.

Also there are military prices. I was told that when the army wants mil-spec bolts as parts they order them as needed, 4 at a time. The makers said they give the bolts to the army for free, shipping free as well, but the army wants a full set of paper work each time and that's what they are billed for.

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