informal survey

[THEOFONE]

for Howard Rosen
                          I concur with your opinion,with one exception. I
call it punishing the customer. Case in point: customer has a 10 yr old piano
and has only had the free tuning shortly after delivery, you get the call. The
piano needs a 3/4-1 whole tone pitch-raise. You set the price at $150. The
customer complains, so you drop it to $125. you do the work and get paid.
                           We make our living telling people that the piano
needs 4 tunings the first year and 2 times a year after that. That piano
should have had 21 paid tunings on it over the past 10 years at least. At $50
per tuning(not counting any maintenence) the customer should have paid  $1050
dollars over the past 10 years BUT they got a 90% discount for the work! And
then we wonder why they complain about cheap jobs? If we charged 3-4-or $500
and spent the day on the piano, we would be a lot happier and the customer
would learn NOT to neglect their piano!
                             Yes Howard, Jim should have charged them at LEAST
$1500
to fix the piano, because they still think they SAVED $1500 and they did
NOT!!!
And as long as we refuse to fix bad work, we essentially sat that it wasnt too
bad then we sanction the bad work by default!!!Remember the 90% discount?
                                                               Theodore Mamel
RPT
                                                                Pittsburgh
Chapter