Consumer question for any PA locksmiths

I can not attest to PA laws or practices. But the company I worked for here in Indiana had the same policy. Since we were only 2 people covering 24/7, and we wanted to have some kind of a life outside of work.

But, in time of need, we would drop anything we were doing, and go out to help somebody in need. So, the clock starts when we hang up the phone as our time is being used till the time we return, not to mention if we travel

15 mins we have costs to cover (fuel, cellphone bill, insurance, increase in chance for an accident, etc...). But, in our case, we made this fact of no cancellation or they still owed us perfectly clear before we accepted the call. So, if he made that fact clear to her, and she accepted those terms, then he is in the right to expect payment.

And how he knew it was you calling to cancel, maybe it was the only call he had scheduled and lived or was 30 mins from you. Or he had caller-id and you called from the same phone #.

Our usual policy was to continue to the location of the call, and talk to the people face to face and remind them to the fact they agreed verbally to our policy and that we were owed for our time.

But let me make one point clear on the charge for these cases. It was either the service call fee (no parts/labor) or if we quoted a flat rate, it was the full flat rate fee quoted (as was the usual case for any type of opening that was not an unusual case).

Steve

Several problems with this:

[I am NOT an attorney and this is NOT legal advice.]

1) I believe that unless implicity expressed by the man on the phone BEFORE-hand, you did not agree to any cancellation fees. This MUST be brought to your intention so that you, the consumer, can make an informed decision. I'm not familiar with PA-specific consumer laws, but just about every state in the country has this in their books.

2) How can they charge you for ANYTHING if they don't have so much as a signature (yours) OR evidence of work performed? Well, they can charge, but collection is another matter.

3) Call a lawyer, not a locksmith, to resolve this. The locksmith wants to charge you $157, so set a limit for a lawyer at $157 to take care of this. For that amount, you should be able to get at least advice from a competent legal expert AND a letter from the attorney sent to the locksmith. 9 times out of 10, that letter alone will get them to back off.

My opinion? (for what it's worth) You got rooked and it's not right. If their fees weren't excessive (as compared to others in the same market and geographical area) and they had responded quickly (if they were first on the scene and actually performed the work, you'd have a tougher fight), they wouldn't NEED this "no cancellation" policy. And on the few occasions they actually got a cancellation, they could chalk those minimal losses up to "the cost of doing business".

Actually, I don't think it's legal to be able to initiate ANYTHING without having a way to cancel. Hell I can walk away from a brand new car within 3 days of signing the contracts. No money owed. The dealership takes the hit. In my state at least (try that more than once and you'll fight a fraud charge and probably lose; once? ok, you're stupid.. twice? BS you're a fraudulent little bastard).

Call another locksmith.

So why didn't you call around some for other prices or somebody you felt more comfortable dealing with?

Caller ID? No other jobs booked?

I called back the second service, the one we ended up going

Bottom line is they probably can't make you pay and probably know that they can't. Push comes to shove how do you even prove WHO you had a contract with under those circumstances? COULD be anybody calling. COULD be a 'send 25 pizzas to 12345 xyz street' kinda prank call. That said you and your roommate are partly to blame for the situation because you called them and agreed to have them come out instead of calling around FIRST. Offer them $25.00 - $50.00 for their wasted time and see if they will call it even.

Give him nothing, he did nothing. He's probably considering it a service charge, a common practice, but he never even showed up so it's bogus.

No need to get attorneys involved. Let him turn it over to a collection agency if he likes, a simple <a href=

CEASE AND DESIST</a>

certified letter will stop them, then the locksmith will have to sue you to attempt to collect, and no judge is going to find for him. Keep the bill, that "7 days and it's off to collections" bit is hilarious.

Read up on public law 95-109, The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. If he threatens you or your credit rating in any way you can sue *him* for damages up to $1000.00

I'm sure you are. That's what they do.

and I

Sounds normal. These guys are total crooks who will rip you off in a second. They don't want to give you a straight quote.

LOL did you tell him to stick it in deep and use plenty of lube?

Actually, he never even asked who I was or

This is business as normal for these locksmith bozos. He can't do a damn thing he's just trying to scare you into paying. Just deny you ever called the ass or that you have any idea what the hell he's talking about. If he keeps anoying you call him up from payphones and run him all over the city or the state if he's stupid enough to go on jobs that don't exist. Doing it at 3am would be good too. He'll get the message.

I had one of these nuts try to charge me $300.00 for making a damn car key one time when his quote was $65.00. I just got in the car and drove off without giving him anything. ROFLOL. He never did anything about it.

Let us assume that the locksmith hung up the phone with you and commenced to travel to your location. If 15 minutes transpired from the first call to the cancelation to the second, then you just took 30 minutes of the mans time. If you add in murphy's law that says the cancelation came just after the exit on the freeway and the next exit was 5 miles down the road then you could have taken more of his time.

Conversly, the guy might not have finished the job he was on yet, and had not put any effort into your service.

But with that said, $157 is awful steep for an evening trip charge. I would suggest that an inquiry be made of the amount that he would have charged to your location buring business hours and then figure that after hours and before midnight would be time and a half.

I would approach this with a phone call to the shop and ask about the price of their calls during the day. I suspect that the trip charge is going to be something around $50, give or take a few bucks.

Now tell him that you have a bill for $157 for a canceled service call and could he explain how he arrived at that price. Given the circumstances you described, (A call two blocks from his office, and in the evening before midnight, and a cancellation 10 of 15 minutes after placing the call.) I would be willing to pay no more than time and a half of the trip charge. Prices and overhead vary by location, but as an example at my shop, a trip charge for a call 2 blocks from the shop would be $35. This would be $57.50 at night.

If the guy is a yahoo and wants to rant and rave suggest that you will pay him nothing and will forward his bill and collection letters to the local radio and television stations, and to the Better Business Bureau.

By the way, how did the locksmith you had open your apartment itemize his bill? This might give a good indication of the going rates in your area.

Hi Steve,

First of all, thanks for responding. Much appreciated.

He did do that but as I said, she wasn't even clear on what he was going to charge. When the bill came, she said that wasn't a figure he quoted. She knew that much for sure.

Apparently that was the case. When she first called, he said he'd call her back and didn't even ask her for the number.

This absolutely wasn't done. No one from that service showed up and I would know since I was out there for a couple of hours waiting for the other guy.

Apparently it was just the service call and the price is outrageous in my opinion.

Unfortunately, she did agree to that. Since it was her phone, I let her call but I wish it had been me. I wouldn't have accepted that.

That's my question, too. There was NO work performed. No one even showed up. I'm sorry but there's no way to justify that it cost $157 to take a phone call. It might technically be legal but it's certainly not right.

Good advice and I'd much rather pay the lawyer that money. At least he will have done something to earn it.

Totally agreed. If they had showed up and actually done something, I would certainly feel I owed them something. They know what they're doing is not right but apparently they are protected by a law that allows them to charge people for nothing and that's what they're doing.

Thank a bunch Aegis. You seem to be the voice of reason in this matter. To me, it's not a matter of what's legal, it's a matter of what's right. Too bad Houdini Locksmiths don't approach it that way.

These people aren't willing to deal. The guy told me he'd give us a

10% discount. Whoopee!

Well that's too bad because they probably can't collect, although really they are entitled to something for their time. Personally I would not even bother trying under those circumstances. Waste of time.

"Joe Consumer" <Joe Consumer@Joe Consumer.net> trolled in message again

---snip the clueless troll---

Hmmm.

If one strips the whining (rain,late at night, no choice) from your story, then you are no different from the following two: A customer is expecting his wife to come back with keys to their property. He has lost his. He does not know when she's back, so he calls a locksmith. If his wife comes home before the lockie, he'll just tell him to get lost, if not, he'll use the locksmith.

Or: the desperate shopkeeper, big deals cookin', but the lock to the damn shop is broken. He calls 5 locksmiths, they all promise to do it within 30 minutes. The shop-keeper knows, that some of them might be exaggerating their speed, so he plans on using the quickest and tell the rest to get lost.

The truth is: Each caller is imposing an economic cost on the lockie, in terms of the average amount of jobs lost by committing to his job, and in terms of time spent to get to the (later annulled) job. Thus, the fact that no work was carried out does not mean that the customer has not made the locksmith incur a cost on his behalf. Reasonable, the customer should pay that cost plus an appropriate margin of profit on that. US$157 does sound high, in daily practice, we find that cancellation fees of betwwen US$40-80 regularly get committed to by the client, and they regularly get paid.

Cheers from the London Dinosaur

Gods, I love killfiles...

I don't really buy that due to the fact that the other service did give me a quote and they stuck to it.

How was that a "mistake"? Is it a mistake to be fair and honest with people? It seems to me that this is the way business should be done. If we had asked him replace or repair the lock, that's a different story. We didn't.

Anything's possible but just because something's possible doesn't mean there should be an automatic charge for it, whether or not it actually happened that way. After dealing with these people, I'm quite sure that even if I'd called back immediately to cancel, we still would have gotten the bill from them.

Then why would they tell us it would take at least half an hour for someone to get here? As I said, their shop is two blocks away.

Believe it or not, that IS for just the service call!

Then nothing lost, right? So what's the charge for?

Absolutely and we appreciated it. We had called them 3 or 4 times to ask when someone was coming, so they were probably happy to get us off their backs!

Maybe so but what if they called me back 10 minutes later, before I'd even left the house? Would they still owe me something then? You might think so but I don't. That's a better comparison to use in this case. There's no way for them to prove to me that they actually had someone on the way here. In fact, the evidence points more toward that not being the case.

Maybe so but it would be a shame if it came to that just because these people are so greedy for a little bit of money that they did nothing to earn.

In general the law should protect both sides but I fail to see how this particular law protects the consumer in any way. Am I missing something?

Thanks, Key. I don't agree with some of what you say but I thank you for responding.

Thanks, Roger. The guy who actually did the work charged $49.00 for the service call and $32.00 for the work. With tax, the bill was $86.67. That should give you a pretty good idea of what a rip-off the other guys are. They want to charge us 3 times as much for a service call they didn't even make!

Every company is different and operates under different policies...

So I would bet that you would have the locksmith leave the lock that failed on the door so you could call up at some later point in time and complain ???

Ok, according to what you have told in your various other posts in this thread it was "late at night" and the place you borrowed the phone book from was "alomst closing", question for you ???

What do you do for work, and how long would it take you to get to your place of employment if called to go in after hours ??? What do you think, they wait around for you to call, or that they sleep in the backroom of their shop in case someone calls ??

If you are talking about proof, the technician having YOUR phone number and address if proof that you called him requesting service... I don't see how you can prove either way if someone working for the locksmith was on his/her way... Your opinion in the matter would be labeled hearsay if it went to court...

You are one to talk about GREED ??? You called around AFTER you had agreed to someone coming out to fix your problem... You are the greedy one in this equation... Stick to your word... Either that or just call someone with a key next time and sit and wait patiently...

If you wanted a quote over the phone you should have asked for one, you agreed to initate a SERVICE CALL when you made contact with the technician... Next time ask for a price first and call around then decide... Don't decide after you have requested service that you are going to be cheap... Or call several people and cancel after the first person arrives... I would pay the bill, or file a lawsuit, but bickering over it on a newsgroup WON'T solve your problem since nobody's opinion offered here will be admissable in a PA court...

Evan the Maintenance Man

We did have him leave the busted lock in the door. And no, we aren't planning on calling him and complaining. What are you talking about?

I never said it was "late at night". Read the post before responding.

Again I ask you... what the hell are you talking about?

Exactly. I can't prove anyone was actually on the way and neither can THEY. If they can't prove that it cost them anything to cancel the job, they can't prove I owe them anything. Get it? The burden is on them if they want to collect.

Again I have to repeat... read the post before you respond to it! We HAD keys. They didn't work in the lock.

Now you're really pissing me off. First, if you had read my post, which you prove again and again that you didn't, you'd know that I didn't make the initial call. Second, don't call me cheap, you bastard. I decided not to let myself get ripped off. There's a big difference. If you want to f*ck people over like these people are trying to do to me, you're just screwing yourself. Judging by your tone and the way you so vehemently defend such an obvious rip off, I'm sure that's exactly how you do business too.

Or call several people and cancel after the first person

That's NOT what I did! Read what I wrote first or don't waste my time!

I would pay the bill, or file a lawsuit, but bickering over it

Your opinion isn't even admissable here.