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Archive March 2011
Monday 14 March 2011
The Lorenzo Walker Technical Institute claims they do vehicle repairs at just a nominal cost plus the cost of parts. It turns out, three days after we got our truck towed there, that what they mean is a nominal cost plus massively overpriced parts, even though they're also getting paid by students to learn about how to repair things.

The guy on the phone claimed "we don't buy wholesale so we can't do prices like you'd find in a discount auto store." Sure, you don't, but you can bloody buy the parts from a discount auto store for half what you're charging, so you're basically lying when you say "a nominal cost plus parts", because you're not charging the price of parts, even retail price. You're charging your own magical inflated retail price that nobody would knowingly pay.

The guy on the phone also said, when it was suggested we could bring the parts, "you wouldn't go to a restaurant and bring your own meat and expect to eat for free." No, you wouldn't, but a restaurant also wouldn't say that they charge a nominal fee plus the price of ingredients, and then say the ingredients cost twice as much as they do, because that would be a big fat lying fraud. Especially if the restaurant claimed to be a school and was getting paid to teach people to cook, using your ingredients.

They also generously offered to buy the truck as-is for $500 - approximately the resale value of the tires alone.

To include some more words for searching, let's say "Lorenzo Walker Technical Institute is a scam." In the end they're being paid full mechanic rates while also charging the people who actually do the work for the "learning experience". I feel like maybe I should start a programming "technical institute", in which programming tasks are supplied by outside parties to whom I only charge a nominal fee plus the bandwidth costs to email your completed source code (bandwidth charged at $1 per byte, uncompressed). And I also charge the programmers $40 an hour for me to tell them how to go about solving the problem. [07:24] [1 comment]