More Rambling

Reading a few articles/posts about how an official representative of the company quoting ¤X to enact a repair being rebuffed by someone who demonstrates a technique that costs ¤0.01X to ¤0.1X made me think about why the official representative's cited price are that high.

Sometimes the [immediate] reason why the price is higher is obvious---the official company representative quotes a cost for a replacement of the component, while the someone is talking about fixing some part of the component instead.

Naturally, if the fix of the part of the component is obvious, simple, and limited, it will cost cheaper than if an entire replacement were done.

But before we claim that the company is practising predatory behaviours, we need to stop and take a step back to see what the situation really is. In many cases, the reason why the company representative is offering a replacement of the entire component is because of certification, the process in which a particular component is legally acknowledged to fulfill specific legal and technical requirements. That certification process is costly because of the tests that need to be conducted on the component itself. So when the person says that he/she can fix it for cheaper, it is often because the cost of certification is taken out of the equation---the costs of labour and parts are still taken into consideration.

For things that are non-structural in nature, relying on a reliable third party fix is probably fine. For structural stuff, it is probably better to rely on the replacement that is offered by the official representative. For things involving safety, it is probably better also to rely on the replacement that is offered by the official representative.

The difficulty then is reduced to determining if the particular component to be repair/replaced is indeed structural/safety, or non-structural. This is where some level of trust in the both the integrity of the person (repair or representative) and his/her technical ability. The integrity of the person determines how likely one is going to be hoodwinked by the said person, while their technical ability controls how correct their technical assessment is likely to be.

Anyway, just throwing this out there. Not really trying to make any deep point or something.

Till the next update.