The price mark up at dealerships is criminal

a reply to: JourneymanWelder

There are other options than your local car dealership.

You can normally find an automotive locksmith, or a locksmith who can cut keys and program transponder chips, as well as programming the new key, for MUCH less than a dealer is charging. Now, I personally, despite being a locksmith, have precisely no interest in cutting car keys, because the equipment and software required to do it right is very expensive as an initial outlay, and I hate dealing with computers at the best of times, and the less I have to interact with them to make my business function, the better for me in my experience. But my mentor, the man who taught me the trade, is a wizard with electronics, and can quite happily create duplicates, reprogram an engine to take totally new key sets, and all that jazz. For a new key, programmed to your car, he normally charges between £70 and £120, depending on the car. Some cars he cannot do, because the codes required to program the cars have not been released by the manufacturers, but this is usually only relevant to very high end vehicles.

Way under dealership price in any case. Its the same here in Britain if you want the dealers to handle your car key problems. They will rip you off badly, to the tune of hundreds of pounds for what really costs less than one hundred pounds to do, even with a decent mark up to permit business to be in some way profitable for the person doing the work. The thing you have to remember with dealerships, is that you are paying for the warranty on the work, and to keep the dealership open. With an automotive locksmith, yes you are paying them a certain amount to ensure business continuity, but it costs way less money to run a small locksmithing outfit, be it one with a brick and mortar location, or a mobile service, than it does to run and insure a premises containing a full workshop, mechanics, and a decent number of cars for sale which all have to be maintained, kept safe, secure and so on.

Basically, if you go to the dealership, you are not just paying for the work, the parts and for the lights to be kept on in the shop. You are paying for a whole bunch of overhead that is nothing to do with you, and that you should not be responsible as a customer for paying the bill on. The dealerships should be paid well enough by head offices, to continue business without those crazy markups. It should cost the car companies money to run those places, not the customer. But thats not how the industry is set up, so please, if you own a car, get your own, good mechanic, get in touch with a good, local automotive locksmith, and save yourself huge, heaping piles of money. If you select good technicians, you can keep the running costs of your vehicle a damned sight more manageable.

Also, if you can, avoid using car dealerships as your point of sale for new and used vehicles. All using them does, is promote their built to fail models of doing business. From Ford to Volkswagen, from Toyota to Fiat, cars these days are built to break, made of flimsy materials and components that WILL die many decades before they ought to. They are built from the ground up, to last far less time on the road than those which came from years before them, and this practice is one of the most damaging things, economically and ecologically about the car marketplace as it stands today. I would urge you all to purchase older cars, and run them till the wheels come off, and try never to purchase new, no matter how much marketing you are exposed to. All you are doing if you use dealerships and get new cars, is promoting a business model that relies on customers getting screwed, the planet and the economy being screwed, and is designed to line the pockets of people who have not worked for their money. I implore you, get older cars, learn to maintain them, or get good technicians independent of dealers to do the work on them. Strangle the car manufacturers till they start churning out cars that will last a century again, and start offering maintenance and parts replacement packages that actually benefit the consumer, the economy and the environment again.

Thats a bit of a rant, sorry about that. Its just one of my pet peeves.

"I was told years ago that unless your vehicle is going into the dealership for warranty work, they will throw a very high price out because they do not want the work."

Just because a dealership has a service department doesn't mean they actually want to service vehicles. They make no money servicing; they are in business to sell new vehicles.

Apple is the exact same way. The goobers at the Apple store will do everything they can to talk you out of paying for repairs on out-of-warranty gadgets (including adding unnecessary repair costs to scare your off) and convince you it's cost beneficial to buy a new item instead. Sleazy. They've all drank the Kool Aide at the genius bar.


The only reason they continue to exist as a company is the people that love love love the image of Apple happily pays they munny despite getting crapped on by the company.