America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs

Some local skilled trade companies have been recently bought out. From feedback I’ve heard from customers, quality has declined. Lots of car dealerships locally have consolidated lately and their service quality has declined while prices have shot up.

While private equity may be making some local business owners rich, they’re ruining the customer experience.

Which opens up the door for the next generation.

With respect to car servicing, I'm getting a deja vu feeling. Like smartphones have made it almost impossible to get a phone repaired by third party companies, car makers are making it very hard to get their cars serviced anywhere other than their dealerships where they can overcharge everything. With so much (unnecessary?) technology in the cars these days, it's easy for them to slap more conditions on the owners and lock in services for years.

It’s not servicing so much as parts. A friend recently had a 4 year old car written off by insurance after a minor front end shunt. He was incredulous so bought the car back from the insurer as part of his settlement BUT the car is still off the road because the laserlight headlights are just over £5000 each from BMW and there’s no second hand ones of the right type available in the UK currently.

It’s quite a lot cheaper to rewire the car for the more common and cheaper Xenon HID headlight (it’s only £300 2nd hand) but a fairly big job with ZERO support from BMW for the conversion.

I have always assumed that as service (or products) get worse consumers will start looking for alternatives. This does not seam to be happening. It might be the alternatives are run out of business and are doing something else now. Maybe consumers have a hard time finding alternatives, as in independent contractors do not show up at the top of the search or are not in the app. Maybe it just cost to much and pays to little to be an alternative. I do not see a lot of open doors.

They might not have a choice but to do so.

UN Regulation 155 and ISO/SAE 21434 are going to require that intra-car communications require some sort of authentication system between computers. It's regulations attempting to get ahead of potential hacks for Vehicle to Everything (V2X) infrastructure.

Unfortunately this likely also means the ability to replace failed ECU's on a car will be only limited to car manufacturers willingness to explicitly authorize a part to be installed into a car, even genuinely OEM parts straight from the manufacturer. Don't know when it comes into force but it's on the way.

Good contractors are hard to find. My longtime one retired. For a bathroom refit a few years ago, I eventually booked through Lowe’s. He got the job done but communication was terrible and his plumber was awful. I live in a fairly small town and I can probably get decent recommendations through Facebook these days.

For recent remodeling though it turned out my housekeeper’s husband is a carpenter and I just coordinated a number of things myself.

It’s definitely harder to find the indy tradespeople now. My tactic has been to spend a bunch of time reading reviews. When the same first name of the tradesperson keeps showing up in the review then it becomes clear it’s a one person company and I’m much more likely to hire them.

If you are the business then you have incentive to do a good job. I have more faith in getting a quality job done by someone like that.

I used to have an HVAC guy like this. I currently have a plumber and a car repair shop like this. I can DIY the smaller things but I know my limits so it’s frustrating when finding good help is difficult.

To be honest, that's a very BMW problem. Good enough reason to stay away from BMW (or any German car really).

One reason the most minor of collisions are so expensive to repair is that car designs no longer include bumpers.

When I consider to purchase a car, I investigate the cost of spare parts and repairs. Also are their spare parts available from other than the original manufacturer?

Unless the megacorps everything consolidates into implement regulatory capture before that can happen.

Bumpers that left the car drivable (i.e. lights still worked and stuff) after an X mph impact were required in the US in the 80s.

People complained a ton about those and how they made cars look ugly.

People look for alternatives but they are increasingly hard to find. Seems most businesses raise prices in lockstep. Competition seems to be sooo yesterday.

Honestly I can tell which ones they are. I've noticed it in our area, it's like some unlabeled class problem. The websites and advertising are different, they approach everything differently. Everything is very overpriced and there's lots of bs that goes on with proposed work, and you can tell the tradesmen and techs have a very different relationship with the rest of the company.

Finding a company that grew organically and is not PE owned is noticeably different, I can tell which ones they are and they often refer to each other.

Hardly just a BMW/German problem.

How long are Teslas sitting in shops waiting for parts, these days?

I think this is true. Its getting hard to find really solid contractors.

I have nothing but speculation and wonder if some of this is due to how much we look down on trade jobs in America. The general attitude has been that a kid who goes to a trade school is a failure compared to a kid who goes to college.