thegarageblog.co.uk : Starbucks, oil and sundries.

Call me sad, but one of the things I enjoy is looking through a car’s service history and particularly amusing are the past service invoices from main dealers. What could possibly be even remotely funny about an old receipt you may ask? Well, I enjoy them because I find it hard to believe that the poor customer actually paid them without complaining, or at least after demanding a new invoice for a lesser amount.

Imagine that you went to a Starbucks or Costa for a large decaf skinny Latte and a blueberry muffin. You pay your £6.00 or so and put the receipt in your pocket. When you get home, you just happen to glance at your receipt and you see that not only have you been charged for your coffee and cake, but also an extra £1.50 for a bottle of Cif cleaning spray and a further £0.50 for something listed as ‘Sundries’ . Well, I guess you’d be pretty annoyed as you didn’t know you were being charged for it, nor told you would be. Well, this happens every day at garages across the land and hardly anyone makes a fuss about it.

So, what’s it all about then? Well, here are some examples of what ‘extras’ can be added to your bill, in many cases adding upwards of £10 to each invoice.

Basically, sundries are any consumables that may be used during the process of servicing your car, but that are not the actual parts such as filters or oils. The following are all classed as sundries by many dealers.

A little squirt of WD40 to loosen a rusty nut
A bit of rag or a blue paper wiper
A dollop of grease for a wheel bearing etc.
A nylon cable tie to secure a wobbly fuel pipe
A few sprays of brake cleaner fluid
Some windscren washer additive

Now, I’m not against charging for what’s used provided the prices are no more expensive than the customer could buy the same product for in the high street. However, I know that the windscreen washer fluid reservoir on a Peugeot 106 only holds a couple of litres in total, and that screenwash is diluted approximately 1 part of additive to 20 of water. So, to be charged £2.50 to refill the screnwash when I could buy a 500ml bottle of additive from Halfords for £1.49, and still have enough left over for refills for the next year is a bit steep! Even more annoying is that even if you had filled the reservoir just before the service, you’re bound to still get charged for it a sit’s just a ’standard charge’. The likelihood of a concerned technician rushing into the service reception and shouting , “Don’t add screenwash to Mrs. Smith’s bill as it was already full when I checked it” is highly unlikely!

Here’s some actual prices of ’sundries’ on the high street.

A 250ml can of WD40 is £2.49 in Halfords, and you’d get a few hundred squirts out of that.

An entire roll of blue wipes (like on a garage forecourt) is around £3.30

A 500g pot of grease is £4.00 and contains enough to grease around 100 wheel bearings

A packet of 30 small nylon cable ties is £2.49 so that’s less than 9p each.

Assuming your car needed a little bit of everything during the service, that’s still less than £2 worth of the above, and far less than the £10 you’d get charged.

“So what”, you might say, “it’s only 8 quid or so” and you’d be right to a certain extent, but when you start looking at the other costs on the invoice, it soon mounts up. For instance, when you buy oil for your car, do you buy it in 1 litre bottles or would you buy a 4 or 5 litre can? In Halfords, a 1 litre bottle of Castrol GTX is currently £7.99 and a 4 litre can of the same is £19.99. So, by buying 4 x 1 litre bottles, you’ll pay £31.96 for the same quantity! A Peugeot 406 2.0 Diesel takes 5 litres so you’d have to buy a 4 litre can and a 1 litre bottle that’d cost £27.98 to fill your engine. That’s pretty expensive in itself, but is nothing compared to the prices charged by some dealers. They invoice their oil in 1/2 litre ‘units’, and often charge £5.00 for one unit! That means that for the same 5 litre quantity of oil, you’d pay them £50.00. Now, you’ll have to take my word for it on this, but garages DO NOT buy their oil in 1/2 litre bottles. Like me, we buy it in either 208 litre oil drums or in ‘bulk’ storage tanks by buying 1000 litres or so at a time. Despite the recent increases in the cost of oil, I can promise you that a litre of Castrol GTX should retail for around £3.50 at the most. So, we’d charge £17.50 + VAT for 5 litres (that’s £20.56) making us significantly cheaper than Halfords and less than half of the main dealer price!

What many savvy customers do (much to the annoyance of the dealers) is to supply their own oil for their service. Even buying it from Halfords, they save at least £20 off the dealers price. If you also remember to leave a can of WD40, a bottle of screenwash concentrate and a couple of rags on the passenger seat, with a note for the technician to use ‘yours’, you could save a further tenner if you’re lucky.

We don’t charge for ’sundries’ as I feel that these products are just part of the normal expenses of running a garage business, much like Starbucks don’t charge you for the fluid to clean their tables. It’s all included in the overall price of the service you’re paying for. We use an excellent local cleaning company to clean our reception area and office, and they don’t charge us for bathroom cleaner, jey cloths or hoover bags as they include them in the overall cost. We do charge for brake fluid, antifreeze, gearbox oil and transmission fluid, but only at prices the same or below the high street. If we only use 200ml of brake fluid when bleeding your brakes, why would we charge you for a litre bottle?

So, next time you’re in a luxuriously-appointed dealer service reception, paying for your service with the smartly-dressed advisor, don’t forget to ask what the ’sundries’ on your bill are for. Oh, and if they charged for your oil in 1/2 litre units, ask them for the empty bottles back!