Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer - my everyday fights with reality

Last Saturday my Range lost it’s water pump on the interstate while doing 70mph. Looks like three of the fan blades disintegrated and the imbalance caused by this destroyed water pump’s bearing (this is my diagnose after looking at it for 5 minutes). Being in the middle of the trip and already 200 miles from home I’ve just towed it to the shop suggested by the tow truck owner, rented something on moved on.

I was thinking - OK, towing Range back home will run me about $300. Then I will have to spend time replacing the water pump anyway. So maybe it’s wort to just let the shop fix it and I’ll pick it up fixed on my way back?

Today I’ve got the call. The shop confirmed my diagnose. The estimate for: water pump, fan blades, serpentine belt and labor - $1100. It took me about 5 minutes to regain my calmness and not call the mechanic names. Eleven f**** hundred f***** dollars for water pump replacement!

As I really didn’t feel like to replace it myself so I’ve started a conversations along the line:
ME: how about I order the parts and you just quote me the labor
mechanic: no, we do not accept parts as we are making our living by marking up the prices on parts (can you believe he actually said that?)
ME: OK, I understand that, so how about I give you the address which is roverparts.com, you go there and get the parts yourself, mark them up whatever percentage you need to and quote me again?
mechanic: no we won’t do that - we buy parts only in our sources so we can provide warranty on them.
ME: But those will be OEM parts from Rover itself
mechanic: doesn’t matter, no is no.

At this point I calmly asked how much do I own for diagnose and storing the car for few days and thanked the guy nicely.

$1100 for water pump replacement. Unbelievable. The needed parts at roverparts.com will total to about $200. That leaves $900 for labor. Shop manual quotes 1.8h shop time for water pump replacement which gives us $500/h! Unbelievable.

I don’t mind paying $100 per shop hour, that is reasonable. I don’t mind paying up to 25% markup on parts - that is reasonable too - they have to spent time and invest money ordering them too.

But nothing pisses me off than people who thinks they can steal from me because it says ‘Range Rover’ on my hood.

Recently I wanted decided to buy small additional piece to our photo equipment. Quick check in Google revealed that my options are pretty much limited to:

a) internet stores with no retail location, with what looked like decent selection and good prices
b) eBay
c) internet stores that belong to big, well known retail companies using internet in addition to their regular operations.

Prices for this particular piece were growing in order presented above. I was a little bit surprised by the difference in prices between stores from a) and eBay. Just a little bit, because I learned over the years that eBay is no longer the cheapest source of goods and if you look deeper, you’ll probably find thing you want cheaper. What intrigued me was the difference. You rarely can find a place 25% cheaper than eBay (we are speaking about new stuff worth a little bit more than $10).

Anyway, I’ll decided to give them a try. I picked one, soniccameras.com made and order and waited. Imagine my surprise when the very next morning I received an email saying:

Thank you for your order. Your order number is: 30206

This email is to confirm receipt of your online order with us.
For your security, please call us at 1-888-450-4111, Option 1
to provide a verbal confirmation so that we can ship out your
order. If you have already called and confirmed your order,
you may disregard this request.

Thanks again for shopping with us.

When I called nice guy told me that they are very sorry but the item is back ordered, I’m 94th in the line and expected wait is around 6 weeks and if I want to wait. Sure I didn’t.

So I canceled the order and went looking for another one. I found one suggested by several price comparing sites, prestigecamera.com. This time I looked not only for price (which was about 10% more than the first one) but also for clear indication that item is in stock. This one clearly said so. So I placed an order. Imagine my surprise when the very next morning I received an email saying:

We thank you for choosing Prestige Camera as your choice
for all your photographic equipment.

In order to further verify your order #53555510, we will
need to speak with you on the phone. Please call our
processing department at 1-800-xxx-xxxx extension
Extension xxx so we may verify and process your order.

I called them and this time story was a little bit different. Again nice man said that the item I ordered is for Japanese market and it won’t work in USA. They have another similar item though designed for US market for the price x. That really pissed me off. Not only there was no info on their site about this, no (as he claimed) pop-up allowing me to choose which option I’d like, The price he offered was equal to MSRP and way above everything else I saw on the Internet. I canceled the order, again.

So I went with eBay, placed an order, payed with PayPal and within 12h received USPS tracking number showing me that the item shipped.

Bottom line: It took less than 3 days to completely ruining opinion I had about internet stores without retail outlet and all price comparing sites. Looks like they are abused to get traffic to scam stores trying to either rip you off on price, or hold your money for unknown number of weeks with vague promise of delivery.

Next time I’ll think twice before I place an order on thing I need pretty quickly.