Episode 353: Stupid Is As Customers Do

On this weeks episode of Grease The Wheels, we ask Gemini why customers are the way they are. There is a good portion of the customer base who knows that their cars are going to break, knows that they can’t fix them, and trusts you to make the right call when it comes to diagnosing and fixing the problems that they have to get back on the road. There is another segment of the customer base that might not trust you 100%, but is still captive to their own lack of knowledge and likely financial constraints. Then there is the third category of customers who don’t know anything, think they know everything, and are some of the most unreasonable people walking the earth today. We also get into the idea of firing customers, the old of video when it comes to informing that second cadre into making the right decisions, and the idea that the service advisors are often the unwilling hostages in these situations. Bottom line, customers need to make the right decisions, and we need to frame those right decisions properly from top to bottom. 

Also Uncle Jimmy forgets that the most important part of the ‘Psychology of Selling’ isn’t in the pitch - it’s in asking the right questions to make your pitch that much more impactful. 

This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Transcript

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All right, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome once again to Greased Wheels, your weekly automotive technician podcast coming to you from your Uncle Jimmy here at the Rock and Roll Garage. Hey, it's time real quick here to just say thank you for everything that you do. I mean it from the bottom of my heart. Seriously, if you're building it, fixing it, whatever you're doing, man, keep up the good work, and thank you very much for keeping up the good work. All right, uh, let me get started here. This particular week, what I want to do is take a certain group of people to task. And no, I am not talking about service advisors for a change. I'm actually going to give them a break. And actually, uh, what I would like to do is kind of give them a uh little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they are at least making an effort and trying to do the job and trying to do the job as correctly as they can. However, they are thwarted massively by the subject of this week's podcast, the customers. Yes, the customers. And what I would like to do is just kind of point out to you and I and anybody else who might be listening that what makes this job difficult is the sheer attitude and the sheer stupidity of the customers that we have. Uh and then I and listen, I want to be fair, uh, and and I'm not real good at it, but I want to be fair and just say right here at the beginning that a lot of our customers are very intelligent people. There's a lot of them that are in in STEM programs where they're you know they're they're scientists and technicians and in in engineering and uh mathematics, and and there's a lot of lot of smart people out there in the world, a lot of people that are very smart, you know. They they're uh working everywhere, doing everything. They're professors, they're engineers, they're building stuff, they're you know, they're they're designing stuff, they're uh you know, working in a business where they have trained uh for a good chunk of their life to make the right decisions and to do the right things. But then when it comes to their automobile, yeah, nah, they don't know a fucking thing about it. And that's one of the things that's very frustrating for us as uh really seriously uh experts at what we do. We know what needs to happen, what needs to be repaired, what needs to be done maintenance-wise in order to keep your automobile running properly and operating safely. But for some reason, people who are intelligent and some people who really, quite frankly, aren't intelligent, just basically fight us tooth and nail about not performing uh certain repairs and maintenance on their vehicles. And even though we recommend them, even though we video what they look like, even though we tell them that it's a very bad situation, even though we uh maybe even describe what can happen if they ignore a specific situation, they still continue to ignore that specific information. And I think that there's a lot of reasons for that. Uh and and I don't want to say to you that every customer that comes in the door is stupid. I wouldn't say that at all. You could certainly have uh people who are highly educated come through the door, see that there is a genuine and honest information being exchanged. Uh, you know, nope, we're not trying to screw anybody, we're not trying to rip anybody off. We're really not. Okay. Some of us, some of you guys out there might be, but uh for the most part, I think that that's uh uh it's not as prevalent as some people think, and some people think that obviously every single one of us is trying to rip them off. So obviously that's not that's not gonna be true, and that's not gonna be true in a lot of cases, and and the reputation that we have as being people who are out there just trying to rip you off is it's not a good one. And and people who are smart, I would like to think people who are smart don't think that way, or at least are a little less suspicious of that. Now, uh I feel that a lot of people who are uh highly educated and uh work in fields where they make a generous wage, when they when they get a machine, when they have a piece of equipment and it needs repair or maintenance, that they're not gonna cheap out and not do it, and they're gonna own up and and think about what is gonna happen or what should happen, and then obviously pony up and and have repairs or maintenance performed. So their equipment, their you know, their machinery, whatever they have, uh not just cars, really honestly, uh maybe uh a lawnmower or uh you know uh any kind of equipment they might have in their garage or even the pool or the roof on their house or anything like that, they might be smart enough to get that stuff taken care of before it goes really fucking bad. And I would say that this compromises, this comprises, let me put it that way, instead, this comprises about a third of your customers. They're very they're professional people who have uh uh more than a modicum of intelligence, maybe they have a higher IQ, maybe they're they're well renowned in their field and and they're just smart, they're smart people, and but smart people sometimes are smart about some things and other things not so much. And then when they take in information from places that are you know kind of shadowy and maybe not places they should get information from, you know, like uh the internet maybe, or friends who have had either bad situations or deathly afraid of bad situations at repair shops, they might adopt a very defensive attitude when they come in. So uh, and then that honestly, if somebody's got uh a major level of intelligence, okay, and is smarter than your average bearer, and they come into your shop and they're cautious. And that would just be smart, really, to just be cautious. But it it would be uh over the edge cautious if you're paralyzed with fear that somebody's gonna try to rip you off at a repair shop, especially if you're a name brand dealer or even a name brand auto group, or if you're just a local mom and pop. I mean, you know, even if you're just if you're just working for a dealership and they own one dealer and the owner is the is the guy who started the dealership years ago, or maybe the son of the guy who started the dealership years ago, and you have an excellent reputation in the community, and some people still are gonna come in and go, uh, I don't want that because they think you're trying to rip them off. Now, that's a third of the people, okay? The other third of the people are a little less reasonable, and then I want to make sure that you understand that that word is really what I'm talking about here when I talk about customers. Uh a third of the people are a little less reasonable than they should be, but they're still somewhat reasonable. And when you when you offer up information to them that sounds right or even looks right, if you're doing videos, uh, you know, I mean, obviously if you do a video and you show a tire, it's got cords hanging out, kind of hard to dispute the video evidence. However, and I think a whole I think a lot of you, and I'm it's unfortunate, I think a lot of you see customers all the time that drive out on tires with cords hanging out of them when they fucking shouldn't. I mean, I I've say in the video sometimes I go, I don't even want to drive this to the car wash. The tires are that bad. And yet there they are driving them down the highway at 80 miles an hour and maybe getting tires three or four days later because they're like, oh, you know, maybe I should get them, and then they get them somewhere else, and it's like, oh, okay, you know, I don't mind diagnosing stuff for you for fucking free. That doesn't that doesn't piss me off at all. No, not at all, you know. So you got a third of the people who are smart and they're kind of, I don't know, cagey about not wanting to get stuff done. Then you got another third of the people who are more cagey about not wanting to get stuff done because they just they just don't believe you, and then you got that last third. And I want to split them in half and go with a go with a 10% and a 20% on that last third because there's about 10% of those people are just plain, absolutely fucking stupid. I'm talking low IQ, booger eating morons, just fucking people. They went to school for a couple of years, maybe, and and dropped out, and then they think they're brilliant, and and they're not, and they're never gonna trust you, and they're never gonna want you to do anything for them because they're just sure as they can be that you're just trying to rip them off, and you know no amount, no amount of videos, no amount of explanations, no amount of showing them what the fuck is wrong with their car is gonna change their mind that you're trying to rip them off, and you got to write those customers right the fuck off. And the thing is, and and I find that this is a problem, I think, and and it's not gonna get solved, okay, because of capitalism and and actually corporate greed, really. I mean, there's no other way to really look at it, but you're gonna have customers who come in and just raise holy hell. And typically, these customers are just lacking in intelligence. I mean, they have an IQ that gets measured on a Richter scale, you know, that you know, the old saying their IQ is a is a school zone speed limit. They're just not smart, they're not smart people. They think you're trying to rip you rip them off, and they're they're loud and obnoxious and angry about it, and they're gonna give you shit, and and maybe you know, they just fucking wish they would go away, but they keep coming back for some reason, and it and you can't even really figure out why, but they've got to go somewhere to have somebody look at their shit, and maybe every once in a while they say, Yeah, you know, I I do need that or whatever, but they're not worth the effort. That 10% of people need to be fired. And I am finding more and more uh lately that places will say, Oh, you can never fire a customer when they absolutely should. I mean, you have we have people, honestly, who keep coming in for our free hour of diag, and they've done it three, four, and five times, and we want to tell them to go fuck themselves and stay the fuck away from us with their busted ass whip. But no, they keep coming back and we keep welcoming them in with open arms, and then we look at their vehicle, we tell them what's wrong, and then they either go home and fix it themselves or they have somebody else fix it. And I I you know I don't want that to backfire, but man, if it does good, fuck them, really, seriously. Now that other 20% that uh we've carved that whole group of customers up into are people who really probably just honestly can't afford to get repairs done to their vehicle. And this is an aggravating thing, too, because if you have a car, you sort of in the back of your mind, you either you either go one of two ways, you have to kind of budget somehow or another for gasoline, insurance, and maintenance items, and maybe a catastrophic repair. Okay, so people who are smart, and I'm talking about the two-thirds of people who are a little above these people, will probably get some sort of an aftermarket warranty. And there's and there's no way I I there's some there's so many of them out there, and some of them are so absolutely fucking terrible. And I don't even want to really dive into that too much tonight because it's it's a subject that just requires a lot of research and a lot of checking things out and talking to people about that stuff, and and I I I find I can't get I can't talk about that subject without getting too worked up because these are people that have, and I mean I'm sure that this is happening in your place. Uh, these are people who will do things to save themselves money that they shouldn't do. And and I'm upset because when you pay your insurance, whether it's insurance on the car for driving it, or whether it's a car um a warranty, which is basically insurance for the mechanics of the car, the mechanical components on the car, it's called a premium. But when you need some sort of repair, they'll fucking scratch at the ground and and try to get you used parts and and parts from China and when your car's not built in China, and it's it's just not a good, it's not a good thing. And I don't enjoy it, I don't appreciate it at all. But it happened to me just this last week. I had a car in that had a faulty oil filter housing, uh, and it was made of bakelite and it broke, and it was there was pieces of it that came out. And the warranty company that this particular person had stated really out loud to the service advisor that ours the OEM piece was just too much. Compared to what? I mean, compared to what? Okay, compared to what? Yeah, they found one made in China by some company, you know, that's selling aftermarket parts in the country, and I'm not I'm not against that completely. Um, yeah, I understand some people would like to have uh cheap parts. I just don't feel like an aftermarket warranty company should be one of the companies that would avail themselves to a cheap aftermarket part, especially when they are the ones who are gonna have to stand behind that repair along with us if it fails, which it might. And if it does, I'm just gonna go, well, told you so. And then we're gonna put an OE piece on it and we're gonna charge you double. Hopefully. I mean, we don't really do that, but if we could, that would be fucking great, wouldn't it? Maybe it destroys the engine, maybe it leaks uh coolant and oil instead of just coolant like it did this time, and a motor blows up. Guess what? You're not gonna get one of them from China, are you? Asshole. So we have we have uh a specific group of customers who are gonna probably consider and get uh aftermarket warranty, but we have this 20% who can't internalize, who can't budget for repairs or maintenance farther. They can't budget farther than just having to put gas in the car. You know, if something would catastrophically go wrong, it would find them in a living paycheck-to-paycheck kind of a mode where they couldn't afford to fix it. And then it becomes our problem. Oh, I can't afford to get it fixed. And uh quite frankly, I mean, with our service advisors, they're gonna have empathy for a customer like that, but there's also really uh nothing else they can do. There's nothing they can do. I mean, short of paying for the repair themselves or getting a uh some kind of a killer discount, maybe, or or having them, I don't know, get used parts, although we don't really allow that. We can't handle really the liability on something like that. But you know, I mean there are options for these people, but should there be? I don't know. They think that they should be smart enough to know that the vehicle, if they drive it for 100, 120,000 miles, they're gonna have some sort of problem, some sort of big problem that is gonna eat their budget to death, that's gonna murder them. And and I don't want to say these people are stupid, but they're short-sighted. And it's not the same thing as being stupid. And as a matter of fact, a lot of people who are really, really smart can absolutely be short-sighted, especially when it comes to their vehicles. Now, so as I have done recently, I uh listed the help of AI with this particular thing because I wanted to see what they would think about this problem. And uh, I gotta be honest with you, I I had to laugh because an AI is a machine. It doesn't I mean it's just ones and zeros, right? But it puts some shit together and adapts and it figures things out and it knows what I'm thinking, it seems like. Which is which is hilarious because even I don't know what I'm thinking. But uh I put to it some questions and and I wanted to just kind of give you read you off the answer because this thing does a better job of of this than I do because it it puts before me things that I wish that I had said before I get off. Uh it's it it puts together things that I would uh have normally forgotten to mention and puts them right in front of me and doesn't allow me to forget them unless of course I want to. You know what I mean? Uh here's the first question I put to uh Gemini. Why do customers never okay automotive repairs they need? And its response was it's the eternal, the eternal struggle of the service bay. You pull a car in, find a blatant safety hazard, or part hanging on by a thread, and the response from the front desk is a soul crushing decline. Decline. Uh all day long, baby. I get those. Uh my phone registers every time I get a decline or an approval, but it seems like it's mostly decline, and I just I just hollered out, decline. From the technician's perspective, it feels like pure insanity. And I gotta be honest with you, yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, you need something. I'm fucking showing you. There is literally, and I've I've I've gone over this with my service manager, and I've talked to some other people about this. There's literally nothing else I can do to show a customer or a service advisor for that matter that somebody fucking needs something. I can show them a part that is just covered with coolant and coolant residue. I can show them an oil pan that has oil that is actively leaking right the fuck out of it. I can show them a tire that is coming apart like a basket that unweaving itself. I can show them that there are breaks where there's no pad material and they're metal to metal, and yet they still fucking decline them. And it makes me shake my head, and it makes me it it honestly, it it makes me question my own sanity. It's like because I feel like there's something I should be able to say, or something I should be able to do, or something I should be able to show them in the video that will change their mind about being such a fucking idiot by just being so blatantly negligent, you know, and that's really what it comes down to, and it's a legal matter. I mean, it can be a legal matter. I mean, suppose you have cords hanging out of your tire, and I tell you that you have cords hanging on your tire, and I document it in a video, and we ask you to buy them, and you don't buy them, and you drive down the road and your tire blows out, and you hit and kill somebody, maybe not a whole school bus full of people, but maybe maybe just one person. Does it even really matter? You you you're negligent, you are completely negligent. We gave you every opportunity to fix this fucking problem, and you I don't want it, I don't want it, which drives me wild because that's really the wrong terminology to use. Okay, when you say I don't want it, you're not using the proper word. You fucking need it, bitch. You fucking need it. There's no want in it anymore. There's no there's no I don't want it. It's like you fucking need it, and I can't get that through to these people. I can't get it through to anybody. They just, I don't know, there's it's just stupid. I can't even get past that. It's just plain stupidity. I mean, how can you look at something and somebody explain to you that it is literally the most dangerous situation going, and then you just go, nah, but I don't want it, and then leave. I I literally, and I don't know if it's just me, because I know that some of you really uh I don't mean to put anybody down, but I know that some of you don't really give a fuck. If somebody doesn't buy a tire, no matter how fucking bad it is, it's like, oh well, it's a daily thing for all of us. It's a daily thing to get a decline on something like that where they need it so fucking bad. And I've I've even actually I this happened about a year a year ago or so. I had a guy come in and he drove on his tires, and he had one that went flat. He drove so far on this tire that it wouldn't it wouldn't honestly hold air anymore, just from driving on it. It wasn't he didn't pick up a nail or anything, he didn't hit anything, he didn't damage the tire, he just wore it right the fuck out completely. And he was like, Oh, I just want to replace that one tire, and the rest of them were you know seconds and maybe minutes behind being that fucking bad too. They were they were all bald and they were cords hanging out all over the fucking place, and I said to him, No, uh-uh, I cannot let you leave this shop with that car with these tires like this. You need four tires, and it appears that you need an alignment too. And and it was even really late on a Saturday, but he bought them. He bought them, and I don't know if it was because I was just so adamant about it, or if he realized that they were bad, or if it was a combination of both. Um, and and it would have been real easy for him to say, Well, I don't have any money, I don't have this, and I don't want that, and but he didn't. He he bought them, and I was like, I felt a little bit better about my own existence because I was able to keep him from fucking killing somebody with that goddamn automobile. Here's what AI goes on to say it says, but when you look at the psychology and the broken dynamics of the industry, and all the broken dynamics of the industry were started probably on day one or day two of the first automobile, really way back 125 years ago. You know, a car came out and a guy bought it and he drove it around on a Saturday and everything was great, and then Saturday night it broke. And on Sunday, a mechanic came out and probably from the factory, because obviously that you know there's weren't a whole lot of people out there fucking wrenching on cars because there weren't a whole lot of cars. And so a guy rolled out from the factory and said, Yeah, you need a new blank. And he went, I don't want that. I just bought it. And the guy goes, Well, if you don't want it, fine, push it home and fuck yourself. Go get a horse or go ride a you know, go fucking ride a bike. I don't give a shit. I mean, where did it all start? I mean, somebody must have originally had the first bank. Had interaction with a technician or mechanic, whatever you want to call him. He must he somebody had the very first one. And since then, everybody else has had that too. Even if they haven't had it, they think they have. Because the whole fucking planet hates us. And it's no excuse for them to be fucking stupid. We are going out of our way to show them what they need, explain to them what they need, and then they don't want it. The reason customers say no usually boil down to a mixture of fear, finances, and a massive failure of communication. Now, folks, the massive failure of communication is the number one reason for the video. Okay. And if you're a technician and you're listening to this and you don't want to do those videos, I understand you completely. I am I'm with you. I'm in your corner. I'm on your side. However, this massive failure of communication is really almost completely alleviated by doing a good video, by showing them what they need, showing them what they need so that they can't really argue with what is being told to them by our service advisors. A massive failure of communication can still happen, but there is really literally nothing else you can do. And what you're doing should alleviate that problem, if not 100%, then 99 or 98% of the time. And so the no boils down to a mixture of fears and finances, okay, and you still have those two to deal with. But the failure of communication if you're doing videos, that's not that's not it anymore. Okay. Here is uh a breakdown of why customers routinely decline repairs they genuinely need. Uh number one, it says here the trust gap, and we're familiar with this, trust me. Uh the mechanic myth, decades of bad pop culture tropes and high profile investigative reports have conditioned the public to think every auto shop is out to scam them. Well, it's like I when I broke down the customers earlier for you, I see, you know, thirty uh thirty-three percent of them are gonna be like, no, they're not doing that. 33% of them are gonna be like, they might be doing that, and then the other 33% are like, yeah, they're definitely trying to fuck me in the ass, and I don't like it, and so I'm not gonna buy anything from them. And then you're gonna let your your cousin fix the car, and then when he can't fix it and he fucks it all up, then you're gonna tow it to me, and you're gonna have to take it in the ass because guess what? If I told you you needed something and you went and you tried to have somebody else do it, and they did it wrong or badly or or broke something in the process, and I have to come along and fix it, then yeah, I'm gonna bend you over. I'm not gonna give you a reach around and it's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt. It should hurt because you're stupid, and stupid people deserve to get hurt for being stupid. That would be the fucking finest thing in the world if if stupid people got punished for being stupid. You know, you don't want to learn things, you don't want to realize how things really are, you don't want to see the forest for the trees, you don't want to know that we're really out there trying to do do the best thing we can by you, then fuck you, really. Uh the suspicion, and this is what it says here, the suspicion, when a customer comes in for a $40 oil change and gets a handed a menu for twelve hundred dollars in suspension work, their immediate defense mechanism kicks in. Well, why why should it? I I don't it it that's what it says here, and yes, I agree that does happen, but it shouldn't. Okay, because number one, the number one thing I tell people, they say, Why is it when I come here uh for an oil change, you tell me I need all this stuff, and I say the same thing every time. I say, Well, it's your car. Okay, it's yours. I didn't put 30,000 miles on it, I didn't drive over the curb, I didn't run over all this shit in the road, I didn't not perform the last oil change. I didn't fucking hit a tree or a deer or a dog, I didn't smash into anything, I didn't run a shopping cart up against the side of it, I didn't fuck your car up at all. I'm telling you what you need to do to make it work properly again, to make it so that it's safe to drive. Okay, you want to have an immediate defense mechanism kick in. Why don't you learn how to fucking drive? Okay, and that's a problem these days. It's a big fucking problem. People do not know how to drive. I used to categorize it like this you learned how to drive from your dad, he learned how to drive from his dad, his dad learned how to drive from his dad, and his dad rode a fucking horse. So there's no real classic training in there, in there anywhere. Okay, it wasn't like learning math the way Socrates did it, or or finding that Aristotle made some sort of manual on how to drive a car. It didn't fucking happen. The car is still really basically pretty brand new as far as society and the planet goes. It's a new, it's still a newish invention. Yeah, it's been around for what, 125 years? That's a drop in a bucket. That's a drop in a bucket as far as history of mankind goes. It is definitely a drop in a very tiny shot glass as far as the planet goes. It's just not been around that long. And here's the thing nobody knows how to drive right. Not even your Uncle Jimmy. Your Uncle Jimmy's probably one of the worst drivers you'll ever encounter. People don't like to ride places with me, which is okay with me because I don't like to have him ride with me. But I don't I tailgate like a motherfucker, I speed, I don't use my turn signal. There's all kinds of things I'm doing that I shouldn't do. Okay? And every once in a while I have to talk to those people with the black and white cars. Just let them know. Yeah, whatever, you know. But seriously, if people learned, and and I I really think that this is true, and I'm not sure how you could even do this, but I think that in in high schools, maybe maybe would be a good place to do this. Just have a semester with a class that teaches people basic fucking shit, maybe not entirely about the automobile, maybe about things that go on in life, you know, like how to, I don't know, not die by taking a toaster into the bathtub with you and stuff like that. I mean, really, literally, there's all kinds of stuff that you could teach people that they don't know, especially when they're in high school. It's like, look, here's how a car works. This is the basics of how a car works. And a lot of times you yourself could figure out why your car's not working or why it runs like shit by just looking at some certain components. Say you got a vibration. Okay, great. Did you hit something? Yeah, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. There you are. If you hit something with the wheels of your vehicle and you bend them, you're gonna have a vibration. End of sentence. It's gonna be on a quiz at the end of the week. How about gasoline? Do you have gas? Does your car run on gas? Is it an ICE car? Yes. Okay. Do you have to put gas in a tank? Yes, you do. Do you always do that? No. Do you run it right down to E? Yes. Do you get stuck on the side of the road with no fucking gas all the time? Yeah, you probably do because you're fucking stupid. We're trying to train you here. And your car, most cars nowadays that run on gasoline still, they'll tell you when they're low. A little light will come on, or you'll get a warning in the cluster. Hey, you're low on fuel. You have X amount of miles to go. And probably you don't have that many miles to go at all. And you should always fill up when that shit comes on. But who is teaching anybody any of this shit? And the answer comes back at resounding nobody. Nobody knows any of this fucking stuff. Nobody knows why you have to take care of this, that, or the other thing. Because nobody taught them shit. Parents nowadays teach your kids how to drive. They don't know how to drive. Do they know anything about their cars? No. So they can't impart any knowledge to them about a car. And what happens is you start to lose that sort of relationship that you have with the machines. Now, I you guys, you particular people who actually do have a relationship with machines, like myself, I definitely have a relationship with machines. We know what we have to do to keep them going. We know what happens when they stop going. We figured things out, and we have a very equitable relationship with our machines, our personal machines. And we can carry this over into the relationship that we have with your machine while it's in our shop. We know what's going on with your car. Why you don't trust us is beyond me. You should trust us. We know what's going on. And even the the newest people in the shop have some sort of a clue as to what the fuck is going on with your car. Because otherwise they wouldn't be in the building, they wouldn't have applied for the job, they wouldn't have accepted the job. Okay, if you take somebody who doesn't know even one fucking thing about a car, is he going to apply for a job as a mechanic? Probably not. We all have knowledge that we can use to help our customers maintain their vehicles. The problem is that a great many of people over the course of the last 30 years or so have started treating their automobiles as if they are strictly appliances. It's just an appliance. It's like the dishwasher. The dishwasher cleans the dishes, the washing machine cleans the clothes, the dryer dries them. What other appliances do you have? You have a refrigerator that keeps things cold. That's what it does. The car. It just takes me to work and brings me home. Is there a need to maintain all this stuff? No. Is there a need to maintain the car? Yes, there is. You see the problem? Most appliances are disposable. I mean, even a refrigerator doesn't cost shit, really. I mean, what's it, a couple, two, three grand? Okay, yeah, that's a little bit of money. And you don't want to have to buy it all the time. But hey, it happens every once in a while. The fridge goes out, and you got to get another one or you got to get it fixed. And you don't even think for a second. You don't, you know, somebody doesn't come into your house and look at your fridge and go, well, you need a new compressor for your fridge in order for it to work again. You don't say, yeah, I don't want it. No, you need a fridge, right? Because you have all kinds of food that you need to keep in that fucking thing, right? Yeah. So you have more of a relationship with your fucking refrigerator than you do with your fucking car. Because when you bring your car to me and I tell you you need tires in order for it to keep going, you go, yeah, I don't want them. It doesn't make any fucking sense. It makes no fucking sense. You're not, you don't know how intricate a car is, and you and but you know you know you need it. You know you need it. You have to get back and forth to work, and it's too far to walk. So you should be a little bit more attentive to the things that we tell you. And you should listen to us when we tell you, hey, you need tires. And I've even said this in in videos, and I don't think my boss would be very happy with me if he heard this, but uh, I I still, because I actually do work for the customers, even though I'm ripping them to shreds right now. I tell people in the videos they listen, you need tires. Your tires are really, really bad, and I can't even I don't even want to let you leave our shop with tires like this. But if you're not gonna buy them from us, go get them from somebody, all right, because this is dangerous. And if you kill somebody, I'm gonna be very upset. Don't let this happen to you. I say it rarely, I maybe said it three times in the course of the last six years that I've been doing videos, but I have said it's like, look, I can tell you're not gonna buy anything from us because we have a long list of history where you bought nothing from us, and so why should that change this time? So get tough, get some fucking tires from somebody because these ones are fucking done. Here's the other point they make here: the lack of verification. If a service advisor just reads off a list of technical jargon without explaining why it matters or showing them the failure, the customer defaults to no because they assume it's a cra it's a cash grab. I almost said a grab cash, grab gadge. That wouldn't have been good. Uh sorry. The customer defaults to no because they assume it's a cash grab. Thank you very much. English is the first language. How about that shit up? Then there's financial sticker shock. That was what something else is said here. Most people do not budget for car repairs. That's why there's warranties. Uh, and like I said, uh folks, uh if you if you're familiar with a warranty that does the right thing by the people who have it, please seriously let me know. Put that if you have the time, comment to the Facebook page a warranty company that does a good job and treats its customers properly and and and does the right thing by them. You know, doesn't call up Yao Zhangping and Beijing and have them send over a fucking oil filter housing that they make there for 12 cents because a 10-year-old's making it or something. I don't want to have to install that shit into a car. Um, I would like to install the OEM part because I know it's gonna work, or at least it's gonna work as long as the one that was in there. I don't know how long this one's gonna work. I hope it I hope it doesn't come back. But on the other hand, the the devil on one shoulder says, Ah, I hope they come back and their motor's blown up. And then the angel on the other side says, Oh, shut up, James. You don't want that. Uh here's what else it says here. Uh most people do non-budget for car repairs. An unexpected $500 or $1,000 bill is a genuine financial emergency for the average household. Yeah, I get it. Most people don't have a whole lot of money kicking around. And even if they do, they don't want to spend it on their car. Nobody likes to spend money in their car. Some of us do. Yes, I do. I don't mind it. But if it, you know, if I'm gonna buy something that my car needs, yeah, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna mope around all day and go, oh, I've got to spend money on my car, and be like, hey, I get to spend money on my car. Uh here's the here's what it says about that. It says the triage mentality. When money is tight, customers do mental triage. If the car still starts, stops, and the radio works, they convince themselves the repair isn't urgent. And that is on it, that's as honest as you can get. That's AI saying, listen, this is what people do. If the car still works, they're gonna keep driving it. You know, if there's something fucking wrong, well, they'll just fucking have to deal with it, right? But they will risk the bad wheel bearing or the leaking oil pan because rent is due. Yeah. Yeah, it does happen. Rent is due or the mortgage is due. The next point they make here is the don't see it, don't feel it rule. If a component hasn't completely failed yet, like worn brake pads or a crack serpentine drive belt, the car feels fine to them. It's incredibly hard to sell a preventive maintenance fix to someone living paycheck to paycheck. Yes, I agree with that. Now, I work myself personally for a Highline Euro brand. I think a lot of you know what it is. I don't need to go out there and spread it around like it's new, it's not news. Our customers should be able to afford the occasional repair to their vehicle. But what we have is uh, and I'm not I'm not ashamed to say this, we have a lot of posers, people who buy our vehicles to kind of send society or their friends or their family or their rivals a message like, hey, look at how look at how well I'm doing. I'm driving a bill in the blank, when in reality they can't afford it, and if it breaks, they really can't afford it. Okay. So there you got that going on too. Total disconnect and communication, a bridge between the shop floor and the customer is a service advisor, and unfortunately, things get lost in translation. Let me just stop right there for a second, okay? AI, as I'm looking at it, remembers everything I've asked it in the past and has kind of tuned into my logic, my thinking, my questions, my answers. And so it can't help but try to badge the service advisors. Uh and I want to leave them out of this, really, because and then I want to be fair, okay? And I always try to be fair, it doesn't always work, but I really like our service advisors, and I I think they're trying harder than I think they do, but it does appear very often that they're not trying at all. And I get a lot of indications that that is actually true. But I'm not going to sit here and stuff them back under the bus every week. All right. And I know too, honestly, uh, I'm not going to lie to you, I know that they put us, they they throw us under the bus as technicians. Because everything that goes wrong in the whole chain, from the customers to the advisors to the technicians to management to ownership, right down to the fucking car wash people, everything is always somebody else's fault. And because typically technicians aren't up front hanging around with the service advisors, if something goes wrong, yeah, the technicians fucked it up again. Oh, the technicians didn't do their job right. Da-da-da-da-da-da. It's fine. And I've said this before, and I I truly mean it. I have a basement apartment under the bus. I am under the bus a lot. If you gotta if you've got a save face or salvage a conversation or salvage a sale by throwing an A technician or me, be me under a bus, then just do it. Okay. I'm a man, I I'm tough, and I'm mentally tough, and I can handle it. I'm not gonna get upset if you tell someone I'm a piece of shit. If it makes a sale, knock yourself out, really. Say, well, the technician's kind of a piece of shit, but he's right in this case, you know. So, but I would like to leave our fellow employees out of this particular one and just really basically rip our customers a new asshole. Because guess what? They fucking deserve it. Now, here's what here's what it said here is said what actually flips the switch, and uh what they're talking about is is flipping the switch so that you get repairs sold. It says the shops and techs that successfully get repairs approved usually do two things differently prioritization and visual proof. And we're doing the visual proof. You and I are we're doing videos, we're doing, we're giving them the visual proof, and I don't even want to mention to you as to whether or not you're getting paid for them. Uh the the the argument is long and drawn out and is still going on. Lots of you not getting paid for videos. Some of us are some of you are getting paid for videos. I'm not anymore. We were for a little while. Uh apparently they feel like it's uh requ it it shouldn't be required to pay when somebody does something. I think if uh if if I was to contact the state labor board and let them know that there were things that I have to do that I don't get paid for, they would say, Yeah, that's not right. That's not right. And they might say, Well, you know, where does it say that? And I'm going, well, it was an amendment to the Constitution, I believe it was called the Emancipation Proclamation. Yeah, it ended slavery. When you have somebody doing something for you and you're not paying for them, it's basically fucking slavery. It's just not right. It's not right. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules, okay? I don't want to dive into that this week, okay? And I'm I may actually do some research on that one because it irritates me to uh get paid very little for doing repairs that don't get sold and and uh and then having all the other things that we do just not make me any money whatsoever. It's really really uh drives me wild. It drives me wild. And uh and when something drives me wild, I usually come on here and complain mightily about it. And I would like to have the facts and the figures and the stats to back it up. Okay. Uh here's what it says here. When a shop ranks repairs by urgency, uh, category one, safety fix today, category two, do it next month, category three, keep an eye on it. The customer doesn't feel backed into a corner. I do this on a on a very regular basis myself personally. I will look at an oil leak and I will rate that oil leak on a scale of one to ten. And I have told people they, you know, they're at a one, it's not really something they need to worry about. They're at a three or four or a five, they don't need to worry about it until they see it, until until they see it dripping on the floor in the garage or the driveway. And then there's a seven, eight, or nine, which is basically a five thirty tsunami gushing out of their vehicle at every stop and every start. So, you know, you got that. Uh, more importantly, digital inspections, yes, completely disdestro the trust gap. Obviously, I I'm a I'm a you know, let me just say this real quick and get it out of the way here. I'm a big fan of the video because it does a couple of things. Number one, it shows the customer you're not bullshitting them. Okay. I mean, in the past, I would tell people, hey, I got a leaky oil pan, they'd be like, Yeah, fuck you, I don't have a leaky oil pan. But you cannot argue with a video. I mean, maybe you could wonder if it is actually your car, but the way we do them and the way you should do them if you're doing them at all, is showing them that it absolutely is their car by showing the license plate, maybe this stupid fucking bumper sticker that says student driver, please be patient or whatever. But it's definitely their car, it's definitely their oil pan, it's definitely leaking, you definitely need to get it fixed. You don't need to do it today, you need to do it soon. Boom. All the pressure's off, but you still have the problem. Okay. Because unless the oil pan has really literally a hole right in the bottom of it and all the oil is drained out, not really a very serious problem to leak oil. Yes, it's not environmentally sound. I get that. Yes, it leaves an oil stain in your driveway. That's not cool. But does an oil pan leak really need to be fixed the very second it shows up? No, it doesn't. And this helps to give you credibility with your customers. Because if you show them something that they need to fix, but they don't need to fix it right now, then you're on their side. That's what I say sometimes. Hey, look, I know it's expensive, I'm on your side. I don't want you to have to do this, you know. But if it gets to the point where you see it on the floor, we'll have to get it done. Then it went on to ask me if we make videos, and then I've answered that question, and I didn't really want to go into to the answers to that. Okay. Uh the next question I asked AI here was I am more concerned with the customer not realizing the concerns are serious. And here's what your local AI local? Is it local? I don't think it's not local. Although many of you have data centers nearby so it probably is local. Here's what the answer was to that one. That is a massive hurdle and when you're dealing with a customer who doesn't understand the difference between a cosmetic issue and a safety failure, the phrase it needs it doesn't register. Believe me, that is a hundred percent true. As a technician, as a service advisor, you can say oh it needs this they're just going to be like in the back of the mind going, yeah, what the fuck do you know? Right? Especially with some of the advisors I said I wasn't going to bash them, but especially with some of the advisors and and the way they they put things across the customers this doesn't seem very serious. It doesn't seem like they have any idea really what they're even talking about in some cases. And so it's tough it's tough for us to have credibility because we're not customer facing. And it's tough for the advisors to have credibility sometimes because they don't look like they know anything and sometimes they act like they don't know anything. And sometimes they just don't know anything. And so you know you got that working against you a little bit too. If they aren't getting the gravity of the situation it usually means the breakdown is happening in how the risk is being framed. Since the advisors aren't showing the videos well excuse that was something that I had said earlier and I have advisors who absolutely will not watch the videos so they don't have any real it feels like they don't have any skin in the game to be honest with you. If you don't watch the videos and and I'll let me be honest with you I'm just going to go off on this just a little bit my videos are so absolutely fucking consistent that if I put in an estimate for rear tires you could fast forward to about three minutes 20 seconds and that's exactly what I'm talking about the rear tires. Okay? You don't have to watch the whole thing. Go in and see how bad the tires are and that should give you an idea of how to sell them. Now obviously if they're just low and they have a whisper of tread and you know maybe two two 30 seconds or maybe a 30 second of a tread and you see that and you know the customer's seen that you can go hey I took a look at the video and it says it shows that your rear tires are getting real low here. Now I've got them in stock and the cars on the lift right now we can go ahead and get them done having a master technician put them on and balance mount them and balance them and then do an alignment for you I really can't think of a better situation for you want to go ahead and do them and and you know every every every fucking time I do that I think to myself why do you make it sound so easy? I don't know. I don't think it is that easy uh am I ever going to find out I don't think so because the first time somebody argued with me about something on their car not being bad when every shred of evidence insists that it is bad then I might just reach across the counter and grab them by the throat and stuff their head down on the floor underneath their car and go, do you see how low this tread is now asshole and then of course that would be my last day that my last day on the job but and it's it's and maybe it's a fantasy I don't know but some people really fucking need that they really need to have their fucking nose rubbed in the shit of how bad their fucking car is here is how this is what it says here here is how to flip the script so the customer actually realizes their car is a rolling liability number one here it says stop using technical terms. I don't know about you guys I don't use any slang in my videos. As a matter of fact I go miles out of my way not to use slang and one of the th one of the things that's kind of funny about my videos this I don't know if it's if you would consider it funny but uh I was doing the videos and measuring the tire tread depth in millimeters because I I work for a Euro brand and the metric system is here to stay and we're going to have to learn it if we don't know it. And if you do know it then you just use it. You know what I mean? But then the tire pro at our place said no tires are usually measured professionally in 30 seconds. And I had a little bit of a discussion with him I said you know what customers don't have a fucking clue what a 30 second is they also don't have a clue what a millimeter is. So either way they don't have a clue when you say oh you got two 30 seconds or one millimeter worth of tread to them that they don't know how much that is if you say that they have any amount of tread whatsoever that means their tire still has tread and that it's probably still good. The only amount of tread that really that really causes any kind of reaction from the customers and honestly doesn't often enough is zero. You have no tread left you are super super low you're running on the cords the cords are the skeleton of the tire it the skeleton of the tire doesn't hold air very well you're going to have a blowout when you go down the road you're going to hit something I usually don't tell customers in a video that they're going to run into a school bus full of teenage cheerleaders or softball players. I don't do that maybe if I did it might work I don't know if it would work on them it's kind of a big batch of hyperbole from your Uncle Jimmy just to say hey you could kill somebody please don't kill people I like please don't kill people that everybody likes. Please don't kill anybody even if nobody likes them okay let's just do that you know uh here's what it said as far as stop using technical terms. Customers don't care about the name of the part they care about what that part does when it fails. If an advisor says oh your lower control arm bushings are torn the customer hears blah blah blah well you see that's that plays right into the hand of the stupid customer. Okay if the control arm bushings are torn or if in our case what happens mostly is that the thrust arm bushings go bad and you get squirrely braking you get squirrely steering and you get a lot of fucking thumping noises and you should fix that. Okay now do I have enough time in a video to really say that no I really don't I say you know if if if and I've come across it many times if a thrust arm bushing is bad you get the wheel flopping all over the place really like a weeble and it's not good. And and I just don't have enough time to really document what's going on with the whole vehicle in a less than five minute video so I kind of count on the advisors somewhat saying you know it it this is what it does. This is why it's not good. Here's what uh here's what they go on to say here the fix. Translate the part into a physical consequence okay yeah obviously the steering's going to be wonky the drive is going to be wonky the ride is going to be wonky and it's going to it's going to cause you to oversteer or understeer in a situation where that would not be good. Instead of needs a left wheel bearing use the wheel bearing is degrading. If it fails completely the front wheel can lock up or detach at highway speeds uh kind of rare I'm sure it's happened I've seen enough of those uh just rolled in videos to know that when a wheel bearing is really really fucking bad some people don't even notice that they they say this is so funny and if you've ever watched those videos I think they're a YouTube thing or they might be an Instagram thing just rolled in is a series of videos made by technicians like you and me that show people who have cars where they have needed repairs months and even years ago and they never got them done and they just kept driving them and in almost every single case and this is so it is so routine to hear this they'll be like oh it just started making noise yesterday yeah no it didn't it's been making noise for two maybe even three years and now you're just bringing it in and these people haven't got a real clue in many cases how bad it is because it says and and this is you know this is why I need to give advisors a little bit of the benefit of the doubt is because even though and they're documenting it not only for the customer but they're documenting it for us on you know Facebook or wherever we're finding this just rolled in they're documenting that it's so fucking horrible that they can't honestly believe as a mechanic or a technician that it got that bad. And then at the end of it they'll say and this just kills me at the end of it they'll say the customer declined the repair are you fucking kidding me the we the wheel is hanging on by the axle shaft there's nothing else holding it into the vehicle nothing. And they're going yeah the customer declined he declined the repair what holy shit that's ridiculous here's what it says here's what it says in instead of use instead of they gave me two uh two examples here one of them was the wheel bearing uh instead of brake pads are at two millimeters use the brake pads are at the end of their usable life stopping distance is significantly increased and you are days away from a total brake failure well uh I don't know I if if I say to somebody that their car is headed for an accident or a total brake failure or some other failure of some sort it feels like a sales tactic to me because I'm pretty sure that if the customer doesn't want it that's how they're gonna feel about it. And I don't really like to use that I like to tell them say hey this really you know if this is if it's really really bad I'm not gonna let up on them. I'm not gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and say look this situation is very dangerous and should be repaired as soon as possible if not right now. And I say it just like that. And it leaves the ball in their court. I don't need to explain to them what's going to happen as far as a total brake failure or failure of the tire. I shouldn't really have to if the brakes fail you know what's going to happen. If the tire fails you know what's going to happen. Only really you won't know what's going to happen. Because obviously if you decline it you have no idea do I have any time at all in the video as a technician to explain to you that you could be driving down the road going 90 miles an hour the car in front of you has to stop because there's something in the road and your brakes are metal to metal and you hit the brakes and they just go hey fuck you dead you dead bitch and you slam into the back of that car. See here's the thing with a car accident okay and I know this from experience if you don't die they don't care really what happened. They don't really care if you didn't die it's like okay you know you you ran into the back of somebody it's your fault and are you gonna say oh well officer I ref I declined to get the brakes replaced on my car that's why this happened you're not gonna fucking say that you're just gonna go oh I couldn't stop my brakes went out hey your brakes went out like fucking three months ago you're just now realizing your brakes went out because they didn't work when you needed them to otherwise you you know before you were just listening to them grind as you came to a stop and you stopped. This time you needed them you needed them to work properly they couldn't and you hit somebody and hopefully hopefully you didn't kill anybody here's what it says here and this is uh this is again this is AI talking okay uh this is number two on that quite the question was uh I'm more concerned with the customers not realizing the concerns are serious here was excuse me here was number two the rule of three prioritization when a customer gets an inspection sheet with eight items on it they get overwhelmed absolutely never mind that they have been ignoring certain things on that fucking sheet uh for years even uh they get overwhelmed and they assume that the shop is greedy and they decline everything yeah fucking yeah monkey to make them take serious concerns seriously you have to separate the church from the state that's a fun way of putting it here demand that the advisor present well I can't demand that the advisor present anything but it says here demand that the advisor presents the estimate broken down into three strict categories uh I don't really feel like I should do this I'm in the back I can't tell them how to do their job here's what it says here number one safety breakdown imminent due today this is the you might not make it home list tie rods blown brake lines completely ball tires massive fuel leaks I had one of those last week I had one of those last week the guy comes in and fuel is actively pouring out of his gas tank and he's like oh I'll get it fixed in Atlanta dude I'm in Dallas I'm about 1400 miles away from Atlanta this guy's gonna drive this car with gasoline pouring right out of it I think it would be fun to just send him on his way for about maybe 500 to a thousand yards and just light that fucking trail of gasoline on fire it'd be kind of like the wily coyote cartoons and the roadrunner uh but he did it he just he just took off and left he didn't give a fuck that his car was leaking fuel uh number two is maintenance advised soon I do that a lot myself you know you don't need it right now but you're gonna need it soon that actually works for me as a sales tactic in the video uh it lets the customer believe that the idea to get the repaired or the maintenance done is their idea because if it's my idea they don't want nothing to do with it. If I say oh you need to do this right now they'll be like yeah fuck you watch this hold my beer but if I say you need to do it soon then they're like well okay yeah maybe I'll just go ahead and do that now. And uh well we've talked about that before leaking valve covers worn belts fluid flushes that's number two number three is the watch list obviously brakes that are uh almost out of spec and and oil that is just starting to leak yeah we'll we'll keep an eye on it for you I say I say that a lot myself too you know if you come back for regular maintenance we'll make sure it doesn't get out of hand for you okay it's not that bad right now next time I see you it might be worse might not have gotten any worse who knows uh it says here number three shift from selling to documenting that's really all anybody wants us to do is to just document really and that's all they should want us to do because the selling part should be done by the service advisor like I said uh whether or not that's getting done or not uh you'll have to make up your own mind on that one people hate being sold to but they hate being legally or financially responsible for disaster even more yeah I I would say you know if I uh what do they say a pennywise a pound foolish yeah you know if you spend a little money on maintenance then you're not gonna be on the side of the road with a connecting rod dangling out from underneath your car it's pretty simple you know that's a disaster that you could prevent with a timely oil change um and it's and I think a lot of people seem to understand that even on even on a very minimal basis they they know they need to change the oil they're not even exactly sure why some people don't think they have to change the oil they're the ones who are going to be asking you uh for goodwill uh help to get a new engine for their vehicle and honestly as far as that shit goes I think that they should go fuck themselves especially if they didn't buy an aftermarket warranty or even a factory extended warranty or if they never did their oil changes then they have to learn the hard way and I'm all for that okay because I learn everything I learned the hard way I don't see any reason why other people on this planet shouldn't too here's what it says here the liability frame when a customer wants to decline a genuine safety hazard like a broken coil spring or cord showing on a tire the advisor needs to change their tone from persuasive to administrative I I can't we like I said we can't tell advisors what to do and what to say or how to say it. Here's the next thing the line Mr customer because this is a severe safety hazard that compromises the steering slash braking of the vehicle I legally cannot let you sign a standard invoice without explicitly noting that you are driving a hazardous vehicle against mechanical advice yeah most shops will not do that so that they could they keep from alienating the customers okay they don't want to do that uh they don't want to fire customers no matter how fucking stupid or angry or idiotic or unreasonable they are they're not gonna do that they're not gonna do that the customers have the money and the shop the shop owner the dealer all those people want that money and they're not gonna do or say anything to interfere with that transaction at all it is not going to happen it is not going to happen. So if you if you think for a second that somebody's gonna really round on a customer about not getting shit done in their car you can fucking forget about that. That's not going to happen. Maybe somebody will be adamant about it but at any given time the customer just says I don't want it I don't want it you can't make me buy it I've heard that from both sides customers saying you can't make me buy it and then the advisor saying I can't make them buy it it's an excuse when the customers do it when they when they it's it's an excuse excuse me it's an excuse when the advisors say it when the customers say it's defiance. It's like a 10 year old boy saying I don't want to go to bed. I I believe honestly that when uh and then you you might have seen this at some point in time on if if you have a shop that uses a pre-printed RO and most shops do you should take a look at the uh at the legalese on the back of it or on the side of it wherever it's printed there is some believe me and even uh you can go down to an Office depot or wherever else Office Max or whatever the fuck they have and you can buy a pack of invoices and uh like you would see in a repair shop maybe an old time repair shop where they hand wrote everything but still they have them and they'll have certain disclaimers on them. Now not obviously not as many as you would for a shop that you owned or even that an auto group owned but you would find all kinds of different disclaimers on there. You know we're we're not responsible for this you're responsible for that this is what we're responsible for if you don't pay us we're gonna come and we're gonna take your children and until we get our money and we're gonna keep your car and all this shit. And maybe there should be something on there that states I'm taking this car with the realization that it is not repaired to any sort of safety standards that would be considered reasonable and I have relieved this particular shop and these particular individuals from any liability in any type of situation that would occur that would be disastrous or even fatal. And I think maybe a handful of people would go wait a minute I don't want to fucking sign that let me just make my car right uh it says here the moment a customer realizes that they have to sign their name next to a paragraph that says I acknowledge my brakes might fail on the way home the reality hits them like a cold shower. Nah yeah there's some people who might be like wow maybe I should get my brakes done and that's really a terrible way to make somebody get their brakes done and if it works yeah who knows who knows if you're saving a life who knows but most people would just be super defiant and say fuck you I'm leaving and I'm not coming back you know so you're probably not going to see that and that's you know that's just a fantasy world where somebody would sign a statement saying oh yeah my car is a dangerous piece of equipment and especially in a condition it's in and if I kill somebody oh well I'm an asshole you're not gonna get anybody to be you're not gonna get anybody to sign that uh it's it this went on here to uh chastise the service advisors again I'm gonna skip that I don't like I said I don't need to do that and then it's it says here and this is the this is what I wrote and I've I'm kind of proud of myself because I'm trying to stick to this it seems too easy to always blame the service advisors why are the customers so fucking stupid and here is the uh AI answer to that it is completely valid to be furious about this so I'm right to be mad right I think you're right to be mad too I mean you know your your wife your kids your parents your friends they all share the road with these fucking people I mean you're you're obviously fixing cars that are sometimes in your neighborhood or in your immediate vicinity or in your area and yeah they drive past your your family all the time and and maybe the school buses that your kids are on and and and other people that you know and like they're driving past them all the time and you know that this is a fucking ticking time bomb going down the goddamn road and I think that honestly the worst thing in the world would be to to tell some fucking clown that he needs brakes or he needs tires or maybe even both and he just says oh I don't want them and then he takes off and then he drives down the road and maybe just later that day or maybe the next day or maybe even a week later he gets into a situation that he can't control his car because car is so fucked up and he hits one of your friends one of your family and he kills them. And that motherfucker he better hope that he kills himself too with that accident because if that was me and I found out he killed somebody in my fucking family after I fucking told him his shit was unsafe to drive I will beat him dead because that is a fucking guy who is too fucking stupid to live. And if he did live I will kill him okay because he's like I said he's too stupid to live. He killed somebody who didn't deserve it he didn't kill somebody who doesn't take care of their shit. You know he doesn't he killed somebody because he didn't take care of his shit. Fucking asshole completely valid to be furious about this. We have to share the highways and and I want to you know I want to just make a little I just want to go off on a tangent just a little bit of a tangent here for a second. The state I'm in now did away with about a year and a half ago or so with the safety inspection. Every year you used to have to come in every I was actually every two Years you'd had to come in and get a safety inspection before you could re-register your vehicle. And it was at those particular times that we would find oh all kinds of shit. Bad brakes, bad tires. And you would have to fix that shit because we weren't going to inspect it and give you a an okay sticker or an okay uh it was it's it's just software now, but it we weren't gonna we weren't gonna say that your car was safe. We weren't gonna do it. You had to fix that shit. And some fucking idiot crowbar in the fucking state legislature or whatever they fucking have here. I don't even know if it's a monarchy or whatever what it is, but they said, oh, we don't need that. We'll just make it the responsibility of the police. The police don't give a fuck what fucking condition the car is in. I mean, unless unless you kill somebody with it, and then they're like, oh, geez, his brakes were bad. Yeah, I could have told you that because he brought him into me three weeks ago, his brakes were fucking bad, and he didn't want them. I didn't want him, I didn't want him. Guess what? Now that he's fucking wiped out a whole family of fucking people with his car because his brakes didn't fucking work, I bet he wants them now. And if you're a police officer, you look in there and you see there's metal to metal on the pay pads, you should fucking take that guy in for criminally negligent homicide. That's what should happen. That's what the legislature, I think, thinks is gonna happen. That's not what's gonna happen. The police, we can barely get them to do the things we need for them to do. They're not gonna be out there keeping people's cars safe by looking at their brakes and their tires. I'm not gonna do that. That's our fucking job. Thank you very much. And yeah, it doesn't pay shit. And people hate it when you bring them a car and they want you to inspect it, and you tell them, oh, you need tires, or you're not gonna pass inspection. Oh, what the fuck? Oh, what the fuck? And then they try to go somewhere else and get an inspection done. And some places will just go, yeah, fine. Your tires look fine to me. They hold air, right? That's it. Here's your fucking, here's your sheet, here's your fucking your safety inspection past sheet, you know. So they don't even use a sticker. Where I come from, they use a sticker. What's weird now is the sticker is not a different color every year. It used to be a different color every year. So if you're driving down the road, if you're a state trooper or a local sheriff or even a fucking town cop, you drive by a car and it's got a red sticker, and the red sticker hasn't been valid for two years. You know that guy needs an inspection and he hasn't gotten one, and you can pull him over and write him a ticket for no inspection. Probably how it should happen. Not that happy about that, but yeah, what are you gonna do? I'd rather I'd rather these people have safe cars than me not have to have to go through the hassle of inspecting my car. As far as I know, the state I'm from still has a state inspection. They have to because cars up there rust at such a horrific rate. People will drive them around until they absolutely can't, they won't work anymore at all, and then they'll still keep driving them. They don't care. Down here where I am in Texas, they stopped doing it. And it's the worst thing they could have ever done. But yeah, you know, who am I? I'm just some fucking asshole with a asshole with a podcast. Uh it's completely valid to be furious about this when you're looking at a clear as day safety hazard, something that could literally cause a catastrophic accident, and the customer looks right at it and says, nah, just change the oil. It feels like weaponizing stupidity. What a term. Weaponized stupidity. You know what? As a matter of fucking fact, I'm gonna write that one down because I got some stuff coming for you, folks, in the future here. And uh you might see this again. Who knows? I'm not kidding you either. I am writing this down. I gotta tell you, this AI stuff, it is get it's it's getting better and better all the time. It really is. Here's what it says after I really did write it down, by the way. Here's what it's here's what it says after that. It says, it's hard not to lose your mind when people treat a 4,000-pound piece of heavy machinery like a disposable smartphone. Yeah, monkey. It is, it's a fucking killing machine. Fucking 4,000 pounds of machinery, and then you're hurtling it across the planet at breakneck speed with the kinetic energy of a fucking small nuclear device. What the fuck? If it's not properly maintained, you're just basically driving a bullet. Uh but here we go. But if we look past the gut reaction anger, which is which is all I have in my life, folks. Gut reaction anger. But if we look past the gut reaction anger, customers usually aren't acting out of pure stupidity. Usually. Sometimes, yes. They are acting out of a profound ignorance, a psychological denial and a complete lack of mechanical empathy. Now that's a that's a pretty profound statement, honestly, okay. Profound ignorance, psychological denial, and a complete lack of mechanical empathy. That really sums it up. Okay, because if they knew the fucking shit that we knew, regardless of what they fucking know, because like I said, everybody's smart in their own way. Well, not everybody, not always, okay, but most people are smart in some way, shape, or form. But when it comes to cars, there's so many fucking people, I say 98, 97% of people don't have any idea how a fucking car works. And so when we try to s tell them that they need certain items on their vehicle, they're acting out of profound ignorance, psychological denial, and a complete lack of mechanical empathy. AI nailed it there, folks. Nothing I can really add to that. That that is the reason that is the exact thing. And smart people, people who know that machines wear out and need to be replaced, they know that they have to have things done. And so they avoid these three pitfalls here. Here's the anatomy of why drivers look completely brain dead to a technician. It's AI again. That's not me. Uh zero mechanical empathy, the appliance mentality. They treat a car the exact same way they treat a refrigerator. See, uh, I didn't even have this. I hadn't even read this before when I was talking about the fridge. It says here, you don't service a fridge, you plug it in and it works until it doesn't, because they don't understand the violent, high friction, high heat environment happening under the hood. They don't understand the parts wear out before they completely snap. Absolutely. The uh the one other point it makes here under that is the but it still drives fallacy, and this is part of the uh uh I wasn't home yet syndrome. To a technician, a tire with cords showing, or a ball joint with two inches of play as a ticking time bomb. Absolutely. To a clueless driver, the car got them to work this morning without exploding. So in their mind, it's fine. They don't understand that parts can fail partially before they fail catastrophically. Yes, absolutely. Loud noises versus silent killers. This is what it says next year. This is this will be interesting. Customers have a completely warped sense of what a serious problem is based entirely on how noisy or inconvenient it is. The broken heat shield. If the heat shield is rattling, they will sprint right to your shop and demand an immediate fix because the noise is embarrassing and annoying. And it's a zero dollar safety risk, but it gets their full intention, their full attention. The dry ball joint, conversely, a completely dry binding ball joint might be silent or a brake line might be rusted thin but not leaking just yet because it isn't making noise or affecting their daily commute right the second. They assume you're exaggerating the danger. Yes, yes, we are exaggerating the danger. We are exaggerating the danger. Uh the normalcy bias and denial when people are faced with a massive, unexpected expense that they cannot afford, their brain's immediate coping mechanism is denial. The mental cop-out. Acknowledging that their car is unsafe means admitting that they are in a financial crisis or that they have to stop driving their lifeline to work. To protect their own sanity, they convince themselves that the shop is just trying to make a buck, or that I'll be I've been driving it like that for months, it'll last a few more. It looks like stupidity from the outside, but it's actually a desperate psychological shield against a reality they can't handle. Okay, that's a little deeper than I wanted to go. It does look like stupidity because it really actually is stupidity. Okay, if you fool yourself into thinking everything's all right, that's fucking stupid. Sorry, there's no other way to put it. Desperate psychological shield. The loss of the neighborhood mechanic relationship. We I did almost an entire podcast on that, didn't I? Yeah, and you know what, folks? I'm I'm of the opinion, and uh I believe that this is this is one of the problems that we have, is that nobody knows who we are, so it's easy to hate us. It's easy to think that we're evil and mean and greedy and grubby and greasy and grimy and and just fucking shitty people. It's easy. It's easy when you don't know something. This is what this is what births racism. Okay, you don't know anything about a particular race. All you know is you don't know anything about them, and so it's just easier to hate them. And maybe you have no fucking reason whatsoever for hating them. And in our case, that's true. You don't have any reason for hating us. We don't own your car, we didn't drive it, we're not the ones fucking it up, we're not the ones who made a fuck up. We're here to fix it for you, we're here to help you out. Why do you hate us? It is stupid to hate us. It is stupid to hate us. And one of the things that went along with that was that in the past, and I talked about it ad infinitum, you used to go down to the local shell station, and there was a guy in the in the garage. He had two bays and he was working on your neighbor's car. Maybe he was doing a putting a new radiator in it, or you know, flushing the brakes, or whatever he was doing, and you you, you know, maybe you even rode your bike there. You rode your bike to the gas station and you knew him. His name was Mr. Smith or Mr. Osborne or you know, you know, just anything. You knew the guy because he knew your dad. And you, you know, like I said, he was on a bowling team with your dad, or he, you know, he had a son your age and you used to hang out at his house. You know him. You knew the mechanic. Did you hate him then? No, you didn't hate him then. Your dad didn't hate him, your mom didn't hate him. They knew him, they went to church with him, they came over for dinner. They, they, you know, they they went and you had a pool and they didn't, and on a hot day you called them up and say, hey, you want to come on over? Bring the kids, we'll have a little pool party. It used to be that people looked after each other like this, okay? And this is this has disappeared over the course of the last 30 years, I would say. It has disappeared where people know the people across the street, they know the people down the block, they they say hello to them, they know their kids, they know where they went to school, they know things about them, they'll help them out. They shovel their driveway because maybe they got uh a bad, maybe they broke a leg in the fall or something. It just it's just it's it's a completely different relationship that the people, not just in this country, but across the planet, have with each other. It is completely different. We don't care about each other anymore, we don't look after each other anymore, we don't say hello to each other anymore. We're too busy looking at our fucking phones. But what it comes down to is I've said this a many times, is that everybody out there who has a car wants to have a guy. They don't want to shop, they want a guy. They want to people say, hey, that thing you had with your car where the brakes were bad, what what happened with that? Oh yeah, I got it taken care of. Oh yeah, who took care of it? I got a guy. Everybody wants a guy. They don't want to shop, they want a guy. And when you do the video, you kind of become that guy. And I don't want to keep banging on you about the video, but the video is extremely important. And it's gonna get to the point here pretty soon where it's just required. And if you don't do a video, people are just gonna just gonna automatically assume you're trying to fuck them in the ass and fucking fix stuff that they don't need. Because if they can't see it, they're definitely not gonna buy it. It might be something we're doing wrong. You know, I mean, we're we're we're we're giving them all the information they possibly need to make the decision, and they're still not making it. If we stop giving them the information, they're definitely not gonna make it. So we need to do the videos, we need to somehow try to become the guy. And for some of us, I mean, myself personally, it has happened where people come in and ask for me because I'm their guy. And and maybe they don't even know it, but I do the best I can to take care of them. I top off all the fluids, I adjust the tire pressures, I'll vacuum the fucking leaves out of their cowl. I've done it many times, I do it all the time. Ask anybody I work with, they'll tell you that that's true. And that's all that they want. They want you to look after them. I even say that in a video. I'm here to look after you, I'm looking after your car. That's what they want. There's no way for any of us out there to honestly keep our customers from being stupid. There's no way, there's nothing. They just are. And what it comes down to is, and then this is the way I feel about it, and then we'll we'll get we'll get done for this week, okay? People who are reasonable about what goes on with their vehicles and whether or not they need to do the repairs are smart if they're reasonable. If they're stupid, they can still be reasonable. But the people who are unreasonable and stupid are the ones that are ruining us, they're killing us. They're out there not getting their brakes done, they're out there driving on bald tires, they're not getting the oil changes done, and then when we tell them that they need catastrophic repairs, it's our fucking fault. No fucking way, man. I'm not buying that at all. You're the it's your fucking car. You need to be responsible for your car. If you want me to help you be responsible for your car, I will. But you have to listen to me and you have to take care of the things that I say that you need to take care of. I will be your guy, but you have to be my customer, and it will be a mutually exclusive relationship where I tell you what's wrong and if you need to do it right now. And if you don't need to do it right now, but you need to take, you need you're gonna need to pay some attention to it, I'll look at it again. Tomorrow, I'll look at it again next week, next month, three months from now, when next time you get an oil change, I'll look at it and we'll let you know then. So what has what has to happen is in order for customers not to be a big, great, big goddamn bunch of stupid fucking ignorant assholes, is for them to back up a little bit and trust us. Even just a little bit would be good. It's not happening that way. Not happening. Nobody's helping them with that, nobody's helping us with that, but we can do that with the video. I I'm hoping that we can do that with the video. People I I think honestly, people are gonna have to start becoming more reasonable because they've gotten to the point now where you're just so completely unreasonable and ignorant. And they might be smart people or they might be stupid people, but if they're unreasonably ignorant, we can't help them. We just can't help them, okay? All right. That's enough for your Uncle Jimmy here. Hopefully, you don't have to deal with a lot of stupid customers. I would think personally that working in a high line like I do, that I would deal with a lot less stupid people. It doesn't seem to be what it doesn't seem to be what's happening. Hopefully, where you are, uh the people are more reasonable, the advisors are better at what they do, and you get uh a lot of your recommendations sold. Uh hopefully your recommendations are actual, honest to God, recommendations that a customer needs. We're good. All right. All right. Listen, I want to say real quick here at the end, thank you very much for listening. Uh we we hit over 350 episodes for Greesta Wheels. A lot of them aren't worth the fuck. Like this one, probably. I don't know. You have to decide for yourself if this is helping you out at all. Uh, maybe just listen to somebody vent about this stuff that you have to vent about. Um, maybe maybe find a way to ask Gemini what's going on. Just say, hey, you know, I'm I'm just not getting any sales here. What should I do? And maybe let it find an answer for you out there in the ether, in the ones and the zeros that exist in in AI. And maybe it comes up with something for you. I don't know. Give it a shot. What the fuck? It's been a lot of fun for me, okay? All right, that's enough. AI says, see you.