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.

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