Flat Rate?

[jeep72]

Which is better Flat

Topic

[3SheetsDiesel]

Depends on if the work is there. Personally, I’ve got a flat rate of pay, with a small hourly stipend which is what I get paid if I don’t turn enough hours. When my shop is cranking out work from the time we open to the time we close, then flat rate is the way to go. But, in the dead of winter when we might get three or four cars a day, we’d all starve to death if we only got our flat rate money.

[twiggy]

As a customer, for obvious reasons, I would prefer that my mechanic get hourly pay.

[dreamer2355]

Flat rate has it pro’s and cons. I think Eric did a video about this a while ago.

[3SheetsDiesel]

The flip side to getting paid hourly rather than flat rate is that is a lot of cases, if you know you’re going to make the same amount of money regardless of if you’re constantly working or constantly sitting around doing nothing, then what incentive do you have to get the cars done quickly?

[Shaun_300]

I’m flat rate, and I like it. Just have to budget for the slower times. Sometimes you’ll only get a 60 hour pay in the dead of winter. But it’s great when it’s busy! Last pay check was 90 hours and 111 hours the one before that.

[JesseTech2000]

I’ve never known anything other than flat rate. With hourly rate when the work slows down they’ll cut your hours and you’re going to make less. When on flat rate you can stick around and you never know when that next golden repair order is going to show up and make your week. There has been times when we where dead all day and then right there at the end of the evening when the other techs chose to go home that last chevy 3.4L rolls in and I’m set up with a gravy intake job, stay late and knock it out in 2 hrs and my day is decent. The hourly guy was sent home at 1 to save on payroll and now he’s eating Roman noodles next week while I’m eating at Wendy’s.

[Rick]

I love ramen noodles!

I suppose the debate will never end on this subject though. There are goods and bads from the customer’s side and from the tech’s side.

As I customer, I think I’d prefer to find a good mechanic and pay actual time worked on the job. My reasoning is that I don’t want you to hurry to slap my brakes (or whatever) together to beat the book. At the same time, I would hope you’d give me a break if it was your first head gasket on this kind of vehicle, so it took you twice as long to do it. The problem with flat-rate is it gives you (the mechanic) too much incentive to cut corners. The problem with hourly from the customer’s perspective is they might have to pay for your inefficiency. Maybe some kind of hybrid would be best– hourly, but if you go way over book time you have to justify it for me to pay– if it was because my car is a rusted piece of junk and every bolt snapped off in its hole, then I pay. If it was because you’ve never done this kind thing before, I don’t pay because it was your “education” time.

I can see how a shop owner might prefer “Flat Rate” to hourly though if hourly means he has to pay his techs for time they’re not working. (With flat rate, the shop owner is only paying when he’s getting more money than he’s paying).

[Author]

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