Air conditioning is very specifically incredibly regulated. Starting with the ozone crisis from Freon, the profession has required stringent licensing to obtain refill refrigerant, despite relatively cheap and easy to acquire tooling. Up until the middle of the Obama administration, it was easy to just buy a can of R410A (the modern refrigerant that doesn’t damage the environment), so for $100 in gauges and hoses and $100 in a can of refrigerant you could refill your own equipment. Subsequently that has become illegal to acquire without the professional licenses, though lots of places don’t check that stringently. This is standard over regulation, but it has some fun, dumb twists. 1) R410A was approved because it’s environmentally safe, was generally available, and then became generally unavailable by EPA regulation, reversing their previous ruling that allowed it to begin with. 2) cars use another refrigerant (R134A), which is largely unregulated, so it’s much more widely available. Meaningfully, it is no different from R410A, though I wouldn’t rush using the cans of recharge you can get at every auto parts and super market to fix my brand new central air unit.
A friend of mine's grandfather is an 'industrial engineer', designing, e.g. 'farm produce processing assembly lines' and the like. I once listened, engrossed, in a long rant in which he held forth on the awful consequences of all of the AC regulations.
I'm always tickled by specific 'inside baseball' perspectives or details and I find it funny that so many are so 'libertarian'.
It’s true everywhere that there’s a bunch of regulation. I was just reading about the new EPA PFOS rule in a Matt Yglesias mailbag -- apparently they’re declaring a level 1000x smaller than we can measure dangerous to human health, but they literally cannot legally mandate levels below what we can reasonably do with modern technology, so it’s a whole shitshow. Other fun ones include the recent issue of this newsletter on the Jones Act and the lead abatement training requirement for general contractors or the abstract concept of notice and comment rule making.
A chargeback is very appropriate here. They tried to scam you, you asked for a refund and got the run around, your credit card company will likey side with you. I once had awful (really fraudulent) plumbing work done and threatening a charger back got me a full refund.
Agreed, though try and get the refund first in writing before the chargeback. Apparently chargebacks toss extra fees on the party getting charged back, so most companies are very sensitive about that. If they have ever dealt with that before, and from what you say they almost certainly have, they will be quick to work with you. They might want to retain the diagnosis fee since they did come out to have a look, but chances are they will be quick to return most everything.
I think a chargeback is warranted, _before_ even trying to get a refund.
It might be better to inform them of the requested chargeback, but I wouldn't wait on already-known assholes to do the right thing on their own.
And I am just personally sick of threatening people. I want to move towards announcing a 'retaliation schedule', and up-front too, for anyone that gives me even a hint of being 'out to get me'. Sadly, it sure seems like, in a LOT of situations, there are few effective means of 'retaliating' at all. My fallback is complaining, loudly, but fairly/accurately, in public, e.g. on Twitter, or online review sites. (I think by being, hopefully, _obviously_ fair, the criticism is given a higher weight in the minds of anyone that reads the review.)
Maybe most sad tho is just how stupid some of this shit is. A lot, beyond deliberate 'malice', seems due to people just being unorganized! And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the malice was, in some sense, _due_ to past stupidity, i.e. NOT being able to run an honest business that's also profitable.
Yea, I don't have a lot of sympathy for HVAC companies that behave like this, but I am willing to assign less to malice and more to incompetence and so give them a chance to make things right. If they refuse to do right, then dump on them.
Plus if one did agree to the diagnostic visit there is an argument for paying it even if the diagnostic wasn't exactly in good faith. A good company that just screwed up should still refund if things were really screwed up, like it sounds like things were. Just that if you hold all the power like one does with a charge back, one should have a little care and restraint in using it I think.
It's more than extra fees. If you get too many chargebacks then the credit card companies take escalating penalties against you, up to and including closing you out of being able to charge people. So it's no joke - which of course isn't obviously good or bad.
"your credit card company will likey side with you"
This is very true. I know someone who recently got a chargeback from a customer. The customer *acknowledged in writing* that they initiated the chargeback by mistake when they didn't recognize the transaction on their bill because they'd forgotten about it, and didn't want a refund. The credit card company refunded them and charged the business a fee anyway.
We just finished doing some major work on our house and I made the same observations. "Manual work" I think often is looked down upon in the elitist circles. But to me it seems very satisfying to be doing things in the real world to make peoples lives/homes better, figuring out puzzles, never having the same exact job, and making good money. It actually motivated me to learn new skills on youtube (where you can learn literally anything of that sort), and do some things around the house on my own. ...definitely underrated use of free time vs twitter etc.
Even something as mundane as picking weeds out of my lawn is a very "zen", satisfying activity. My wife loves occasionally making the goal of her walks picking up garbage. Trying to instill some of this in our kids. We'd have much nicer surroundings if instead of sitting quietly meditating for hours people would just something useful haha.
It’s not infrequently where I lament (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that “I could’ve just been a damn electrician”.
As someone familiar with the building trades, the level of scammery mixed with incompetence in residential contractors (in particular) is quite bad. Their biggest sales tool really is the social discomfort and awkwardness of folks not wanting to argue. Much like vampires, once you’ve invited them in the door it’s sometimes too late, but there isn’t a great “in advance” heuristic that I’ve found yet.
The thing I always wonder about this: what is the friction point that is preventing enough entrants from coming into the trades market to prevent this kind of thing? _Every_ business has incentives to get as much money as they can out of you through whatever tactics are not explicitly illegal (and sometimes even then).
So if this experience is so universal, then why aren't more people who are willing to just give a reasonable, no bullshit quote up front without the unpleasantness to the point where these tactics are no longer successful (because someone else will give a better price)?
Whatever those friction points preventing entry are, it seems like a _super_ high value target to get rid of them
The HVAC company I used to work for (one of the biggest names locally, and not obviously sleazy in my experience) would charge a "diagnostic fee" in the form of a one-hour minimum. That always struck me as reasonable, given travel times.
Sorry to hear about the problem, and glad to hear about the resolution.
We had a similar problem with our AC about 5 years ago. Fortunately my wife has zero discomfort in negotiating with people and we had around 15 people come in to diagnose the problem. We received quotes from 24,000$ for a whole new heating and cooling system to 500$ to replace the fan and maybe a capacitor. Part of the issue was that it was an older system with the pre R410A refrigerant, so guys who couldn't fix big parts and just replaced them couldn't do just the outside unit.
During this time I spent a half dozen hours on youtube and found out how to replace the likely culprits in the system myself. ~250$ at Grainger and a few hours more I had the system working perfectly. To be fair, that probably was in line with the 500$ quote all told, though I switched out three parts instead of one or two.
Long story short, most "repairmen" are just salesmen for new equipment. A few are the real deal, in our experience mostly the guys whose family owns the business, Dave and Sons where the sons actually show up with Dave sort of deal. The larger lesson we have learned is that if you are pretty clever and careful, about 90% of home repair work can be done yourself with some research, and even if you screw up and do it twice you are likely to come out way ahead of hiring contractors. At this point I have replaced every appliance in a house except for the heat exchanger/furnace myself, and it isn't that bad if you don't mind learning how and buying the tools.
My brother and I have fixed so many things around our houses via YouTube that he created a verb for it: GoogleYouTube it. We just googleyoutube it. I usually find that once I've spent a little time on there learning the basics, the solutions aren't too hard. You do have to have a sort of built in ability to determine if the person who created the video actually knows what they are doing though. And you have to be able to deal with failing if it actually is too hard for you.
I think you nailed the description: watch some videos and it isn't too hard. There might be a bit of a curve for people who have never fixed things before, but you gotta start somewhere :)
Sussing out whether the person is full of crap is sometimes tough, but often there will be enough people doing videos that you can kind of triangulate on what makes sense. To me that's the biggest advantage over having tons of contractors come and give their opinion, getting all the opinions quickly and not having them try to sell you on it while in your living room.
As to failure, well, I don't do electrical or plumbing much myself. Those two kind of scare me a bit because they can make a much bigger mess if you screw them up. Still, even they aren't too bad if you are just doing limited "unhook this part, hook in replacement part" sort of stuff. Just remember to turn off the circuit or valve! Especially with plumbing, modern pressure joints make things so much easier... I hated having to sweat joints with my dad as a kid only to invariably have the damned things leak.
My own scarier (to me) version of this involved lawyers. I think needing to pay to even ask questions makes it even worse. Having to pay (and a LOT) up-front also makes it hard to NOT think they're out to get you, at least on some level.
I was also shocked by how un-professionally incompetent my 'data sample subjects' were.
And, like you, I wasn't sure what to do, if anything, along the lines of even reporting their bad behavior. I ended-up leaving a very critical, but still fair, review online for one. I definitely considered reporting another to the relevant 'bar association' organization. I decided not to mostly because the expected value seemed so low. Suing a lawyer for unprofessional conduct just seemed like an almost certain waste of money (and time, and energy, etc.).
Having looked into the details of professional legal practice, I was dismayed to discover that it's almost (as if it was) deliberately organized/regulated badly, e.g. restrictions on how legal services can be supported/operated in corporate/company structures/organizations. That kind of thing does seem to explain the dysfunction I've observed, and, sadly, at least for individual lawyers or law firms, excuse it, if only in a practical sense. (What's the point of even being mad/angry at mostly indifferent professionals because they're mostly just following their economic incentives?)
While I agree that aircon repair is relatively safe from automation in the medium term, what it might be less safe from is increasingly efficient supply chains and industrial manufacturing. More and more things are made so efficiently in places with relatively cheap labor and massive manufacturing capacity, like China, that they are not worth repairing in places with expensive labor and lots of red tape, like America. At some point, even an expensive product like an aircon unit might be cheaper to replace than repair. I suppose you will still need someone to install it, though.
I've been in the 'mode' you describe with respect to AC (and in NYC too)!
I'm guessing Zvi lives in a nicer building than I typically have. I've only lived in one apartment with 'central air', and only known like one other person close to me with it either. Everywhere else I've lived here, I've had a window AC.
Zvi seems to have the intermediate setup – 'built-in window' units. Newer buildings have something like 'standard ports' for what are, functionally, special window units. The only real difference between them and 'regular window units' is that they have their own 'special windows'. I've always wondered how well they work, from the POV of a resident/owner of an apartment/condo with them, in terms of, e.g. how much pain is required to have them fixed/repaired/replaced when/if that's necessary. A regular window unit is beautifully simple in comparison – just replace it!
I definitely wouldn't bother trying to have a regular window AC unit repaired. It's almost certainly cheaper to just replace them if/when they break, and even if it wasn't strictly _financially_ cheaper, I am willing to pay a LOT to not have to deal with someone that even just _might_ be out to get me; way more than what I've typically spent on any window AC unit :)
Write an email to the first company. Write it like a buisness email, and demonstrate that you are the scariest type of adversary - the kind that takes meticulous notes and will keep to a schedule. "Hello, this email is in reference to service call XXX-XX on yy/yy/yyyy. As you know, $Name and $Name were dispatched to do stuff. They diagnosed the issue as X and attempted to charge me $LargeNumber. They were incorrect. Further investigation demonstrated Y was the case and it was repaired by a competitor for $MuchSmallerNumber.
Your diagnosis demonstrates that either $Name and $Name are incompitent or attempted to faudulently lie about the diagnosis and overcharge me. I require refund of $WhateverIPaid due to the fact the either incompetent or faudulent diagnostic work is not what I agreed to. If I do not hear from you by $SevenDaysFromNow, I will be forced to begin a chargeback."
You likely won't hear back from then, and then you've demonstrated to your credit card company that you did everything you could to get a refund. Which they will require. (You did pay with a credit card, right?)
This feels weird to write, but despite being someone who "came for the Abstract Reference Posts, stayed for the Covid Reporting" - I actually really enjoy these little slice-of-rational-life style posts. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that even community juggernauts are, at the end of the day, going through most of the same everyday travails as everyone else. And that rationalism doesn't necessarily improve outcomes during The Game Itself, although it makes for a fascinating post-play breakdown. System 2 takes time to engage!
Speaking of Abstract Reference Posts, I often find myself wanting to link to a non-existent one that might be summed up as "Mild Social Awkwardness: The Most Powerful Force in Human Interactions". There are ones that gesture in that direction, like Something Was Wrong, but not in a fully general way.
As for the dilemma at hand - seems useful to break down desired outcomes into two categories: A) securing personal financial remuneration; B) ensuring others don't Get Got in this way, or at least as easily. Which matters more for solution-optimization purposes? I haven't had much run-in with contractors myself, but of that small set, almost all feared the knock-on effects of potential reputation trashing more than enough to (eventually, with griping) entertain fairly generous refund proposals. Knowing e.g. realtors helps make this threat more credible. Caveat: small town experiences, YMMV in NYC.
"What am I supposed to do now? Chargeback? Report to better business bureau?"
Both. And a Yelp review.
If it is an honest mistake and you trust their explanation you can resolve the issue with BBB and delete the Yelp review. If it is an honest mistake they won't have any (or at least many) chargebacks and their business won't be impacted.
If it is a series of scams not reporting just creates more suckers down the road to get taken.
This is a common occurrence in my experience. Over the course of three houses, I’ve been told several times that our A/C’s were shot and needed to be replaced. On second opinions, a minor repair was able to rectify each situation. I’ve never had to replace one. Friends have had similar experience. The economic incentive is to sell you a multi-$10k new install over a $20 part and a $200 service charge.
I second everything here. The average level of competence and honesty in any form of contracting is absurdly low. I've always attributed it to us a a society spending decades actively discouraging anyone who seems competent and capable of learning skills effectively as a kid from going into anything resembling a trade as an adult.
Edit to add: local laws (licensing, permitting, inspection processes, and so on) also make a huge difference, and in my experience there's a tremendous amount of value locked up in professionals knowing how to navigate the local bureaucracy because they know what the local officials think the written rules *really* mean.
Air conditioning is very specifically incredibly regulated. Starting with the ozone crisis from Freon, the profession has required stringent licensing to obtain refill refrigerant, despite relatively cheap and easy to acquire tooling. Up until the middle of the Obama administration, it was easy to just buy a can of R410A (the modern refrigerant that doesn’t damage the environment), so for $100 in gauges and hoses and $100 in a can of refrigerant you could refill your own equipment. Subsequently that has become illegal to acquire without the professional licenses, though lots of places don’t check that stringently. This is standard over regulation, but it has some fun, dumb twists. 1) R410A was approved because it’s environmentally safe, was generally available, and then became generally unavailable by EPA regulation, reversing their previous ruling that allowed it to begin with. 2) cars use another refrigerant (R134A), which is largely unregulated, so it’s much more widely available. Meaningfully, it is no different from R410A, though I wouldn’t rush using the cans of recharge you can get at every auto parts and super market to fix my brand new central air unit.
A friend of mine's grandfather is an 'industrial engineer', designing, e.g. 'farm produce processing assembly lines' and the like. I once listened, engrossed, in a long rant in which he held forth on the awful consequences of all of the AC regulations.
I'm always tickled by specific 'inside baseball' perspectives or details and I find it funny that so many are so 'libertarian'.
It’s true everywhere that there’s a bunch of regulation. I was just reading about the new EPA PFOS rule in a Matt Yglesias mailbag -- apparently they’re declaring a level 1000x smaller than we can measure dangerous to human health, but they literally cannot legally mandate levels below what we can reasonably do with modern technology, so it’s a whole shitshow. Other fun ones include the recent issue of this newsletter on the Jones Act and the lead abatement training requirement for general contractors or the abstract concept of notice and comment rule making.
A chargeback is very appropriate here. They tried to scam you, you asked for a refund and got the run around, your credit card company will likey side with you. I once had awful (really fraudulent) plumbing work done and threatening a charger back got me a full refund.
Agreed, though try and get the refund first in writing before the chargeback. Apparently chargebacks toss extra fees on the party getting charged back, so most companies are very sensitive about that. If they have ever dealt with that before, and from what you say they almost certainly have, they will be quick to work with you. They might want to retain the diagnosis fee since they did come out to have a look, but chances are they will be quick to return most everything.
I think a chargeback is warranted, _before_ even trying to get a refund.
It might be better to inform them of the requested chargeback, but I wouldn't wait on already-known assholes to do the right thing on their own.
And I am just personally sick of threatening people. I want to move towards announcing a 'retaliation schedule', and up-front too, for anyone that gives me even a hint of being 'out to get me'. Sadly, it sure seems like, in a LOT of situations, there are few effective means of 'retaliating' at all. My fallback is complaining, loudly, but fairly/accurately, in public, e.g. on Twitter, or online review sites. (I think by being, hopefully, _obviously_ fair, the criticism is given a higher weight in the minds of anyone that reads the review.)
Maybe most sad tho is just how stupid some of this shit is. A lot, beyond deliberate 'malice', seems due to people just being unorganized! And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the malice was, in some sense, _due_ to past stupidity, i.e. NOT being able to run an honest business that's also profitable.
Yea, I don't have a lot of sympathy for HVAC companies that behave like this, but I am willing to assign less to malice and more to incompetence and so give them a chance to make things right. If they refuse to do right, then dump on them.
Plus if one did agree to the diagnostic visit there is an argument for paying it even if the diagnostic wasn't exactly in good faith. A good company that just screwed up should still refund if things were really screwed up, like it sounds like things were. Just that if you hold all the power like one does with a charge back, one should have a little care and restraint in using it I think.
It's more than extra fees. If you get too many chargebacks then the credit card companies take escalating penalties against you, up to and including closing you out of being able to charge people. So it's no joke - which of course isn't obviously good or bad.
"your credit card company will likey side with you"
This is very true. I know someone who recently got a chargeback from a customer. The customer *acknowledged in writing* that they initiated the chargeback by mistake when they didn't recognize the transaction on their bill because they'd forgotten about it, and didn't want a refund. The credit card company refunded them and charged the business a fee anyway.
We just finished doing some major work on our house and I made the same observations. "Manual work" I think often is looked down upon in the elitist circles. But to me it seems very satisfying to be doing things in the real world to make peoples lives/homes better, figuring out puzzles, never having the same exact job, and making good money. It actually motivated me to learn new skills on youtube (where you can learn literally anything of that sort), and do some things around the house on my own. ...definitely underrated use of free time vs twitter etc.
I've derived a good bit of satisfaction _physically_ working on computers and computer equipment!
Even something as mundane as picking weeds out of my lawn is a very "zen", satisfying activity. My wife loves occasionally making the goal of her walks picking up garbage. Trying to instill some of this in our kids. We'd have much nicer surroundings if instead of sitting quietly meditating for hours people would just something useful haha.
It’s not infrequently where I lament (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that “I could’ve just been a damn electrician”.
As someone familiar with the building trades, the level of scammery mixed with incompetence in residential contractors (in particular) is quite bad. Their biggest sales tool really is the social discomfort and awkwardness of folks not wanting to argue. Much like vampires, once you’ve invited them in the door it’s sometimes too late, but there isn’t a great “in advance” heuristic that I’ve found yet.
The thing I always wonder about this: what is the friction point that is preventing enough entrants from coming into the trades market to prevent this kind of thing? _Every_ business has incentives to get as much money as they can out of you through whatever tactics are not explicitly illegal (and sometimes even then).
So if this experience is so universal, then why aren't more people who are willing to just give a reasonable, no bullshit quote up front without the unpleasantness to the point where these tactics are no longer successful (because someone else will give a better price)?
Whatever those friction points preventing entry are, it seems like a _super_ high value target to get rid of them
The HVAC company I used to work for (one of the biggest names locally, and not obviously sleazy in my experience) would charge a "diagnostic fee" in the form of a one-hour minimum. That always struck me as reasonable, given travel times.
Enjoy your work. Don't you mean nominative determinism?
Sorry to hear about the problem, and glad to hear about the resolution.
We had a similar problem with our AC about 5 years ago. Fortunately my wife has zero discomfort in negotiating with people and we had around 15 people come in to diagnose the problem. We received quotes from 24,000$ for a whole new heating and cooling system to 500$ to replace the fan and maybe a capacitor. Part of the issue was that it was an older system with the pre R410A refrigerant, so guys who couldn't fix big parts and just replaced them couldn't do just the outside unit.
During this time I spent a half dozen hours on youtube and found out how to replace the likely culprits in the system myself. ~250$ at Grainger and a few hours more I had the system working perfectly. To be fair, that probably was in line with the 500$ quote all told, though I switched out three parts instead of one or two.
Long story short, most "repairmen" are just salesmen for new equipment. A few are the real deal, in our experience mostly the guys whose family owns the business, Dave and Sons where the sons actually show up with Dave sort of deal. The larger lesson we have learned is that if you are pretty clever and careful, about 90% of home repair work can be done yourself with some research, and even if you screw up and do it twice you are likely to come out way ahead of hiring contractors. At this point I have replaced every appliance in a house except for the heat exchanger/furnace myself, and it isn't that bad if you don't mind learning how and buying the tools.
My brother and I have fixed so many things around our houses via YouTube that he created a verb for it: GoogleYouTube it. We just googleyoutube it. I usually find that once I've spent a little time on there learning the basics, the solutions aren't too hard. You do have to have a sort of built in ability to determine if the person who created the video actually knows what they are doing though. And you have to be able to deal with failing if it actually is too hard for you.
I think you nailed the description: watch some videos and it isn't too hard. There might be a bit of a curve for people who have never fixed things before, but you gotta start somewhere :)
Sussing out whether the person is full of crap is sometimes tough, but often there will be enough people doing videos that you can kind of triangulate on what makes sense. To me that's the biggest advantage over having tons of contractors come and give their opinion, getting all the opinions quickly and not having them try to sell you on it while in your living room.
As to failure, well, I don't do electrical or plumbing much myself. Those two kind of scare me a bit because they can make a much bigger mess if you screw them up. Still, even they aren't too bad if you are just doing limited "unhook this part, hook in replacement part" sort of stuff. Just remember to turn off the circuit or valve! Especially with plumbing, modern pressure joints make things so much easier... I hated having to sweat joints with my dad as a kid only to invariably have the damned things leak.
My own scarier (to me) version of this involved lawyers. I think needing to pay to even ask questions makes it even worse. Having to pay (and a LOT) up-front also makes it hard to NOT think they're out to get you, at least on some level.
I was also shocked by how un-professionally incompetent my 'data sample subjects' were.
And, like you, I wasn't sure what to do, if anything, along the lines of even reporting their bad behavior. I ended-up leaving a very critical, but still fair, review online for one. I definitely considered reporting another to the relevant 'bar association' organization. I decided not to mostly because the expected value seemed so low. Suing a lawyer for unprofessional conduct just seemed like an almost certain waste of money (and time, and energy, etc.).
Having looked into the details of professional legal practice, I was dismayed to discover that it's almost (as if it was) deliberately organized/regulated badly, e.g. restrictions on how legal services can be supported/operated in corporate/company structures/organizations. That kind of thing does seem to explain the dysfunction I've observed, and, sadly, at least for individual lawyers or law firms, excuse it, if only in a practical sense. (What's the point of even being mad/angry at mostly indifferent professionals because they're mostly just following their economic incentives?)
While I agree that aircon repair is relatively safe from automation in the medium term, what it might be less safe from is increasingly efficient supply chains and industrial manufacturing. More and more things are made so efficiently in places with relatively cheap labor and massive manufacturing capacity, like China, that they are not worth repairing in places with expensive labor and lots of red tape, like America. At some point, even an expensive product like an aircon unit might be cheaper to replace than repair. I suppose you will still need someone to install it, though.
I've been in the 'mode' you describe with respect to AC (and in NYC too)!
I'm guessing Zvi lives in a nicer building than I typically have. I've only lived in one apartment with 'central air', and only known like one other person close to me with it either. Everywhere else I've lived here, I've had a window AC.
Zvi seems to have the intermediate setup – 'built-in window' units. Newer buildings have something like 'standard ports' for what are, functionally, special window units. The only real difference between them and 'regular window units' is that they have their own 'special windows'. I've always wondered how well they work, from the POV of a resident/owner of an apartment/condo with them, in terms of, e.g. how much pain is required to have them fixed/repaired/replaced when/if that's necessary. A regular window unit is beautifully simple in comparison – just replace it!
I definitely wouldn't bother trying to have a regular window AC unit repaired. It's almost certainly cheaper to just replace them if/when they break, and even if it wasn't strictly _financially_ cheaper, I am willing to pay a LOT to not have to deal with someone that even just _might_ be out to get me; way more than what I've typically spent on any window AC unit :)
Here is what I would do, if it was me.
Write an email to the first company. Write it like a buisness email, and demonstrate that you are the scariest type of adversary - the kind that takes meticulous notes and will keep to a schedule. "Hello, this email is in reference to service call XXX-XX on yy/yy/yyyy. As you know, $Name and $Name were dispatched to do stuff. They diagnosed the issue as X and attempted to charge me $LargeNumber. They were incorrect. Further investigation demonstrated Y was the case and it was repaired by a competitor for $MuchSmallerNumber.
Your diagnosis demonstrates that either $Name and $Name are incompitent or attempted to faudulently lie about the diagnosis and overcharge me. I require refund of $WhateverIPaid due to the fact the either incompetent or faudulent diagnostic work is not what I agreed to. If I do not hear from you by $SevenDaysFromNow, I will be forced to begin a chargeback."
You likely won't hear back from then, and then you've demonstrated to your credit card company that you did everything you could to get a refund. Which they will require. (You did pay with a credit card, right?)
I wonder about the super; why did they recommend this company if they're so terrible?
I thought fixing the AC would've been the super's job. Different cultures?
This feels weird to write, but despite being someone who "came for the Abstract Reference Posts, stayed for the Covid Reporting" - I actually really enjoy these little slice-of-rational-life style posts. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that even community juggernauts are, at the end of the day, going through most of the same everyday travails as everyone else. And that rationalism doesn't necessarily improve outcomes during The Game Itself, although it makes for a fascinating post-play breakdown. System 2 takes time to engage!
Speaking of Abstract Reference Posts, I often find myself wanting to link to a non-existent one that might be summed up as "Mild Social Awkwardness: The Most Powerful Force in Human Interactions". There are ones that gesture in that direction, like Something Was Wrong, but not in a fully general way.
As for the dilemma at hand - seems useful to break down desired outcomes into two categories: A) securing personal financial remuneration; B) ensuring others don't Get Got in this way, or at least as easily. Which matters more for solution-optimization purposes? I haven't had much run-in with contractors myself, but of that small set, almost all feared the knock-on effects of potential reputation trashing more than enough to (eventually, with griping) entertain fairly generous refund proposals. Knowing e.g. realtors helps make this threat more credible. Caveat: small town experiences, YMMV in NYC.
"What am I supposed to do now? Chargeback? Report to better business bureau?"
Both. And a Yelp review.
If it is an honest mistake and you trust their explanation you can resolve the issue with BBB and delete the Yelp review. If it is an honest mistake they won't have any (or at least many) chargebacks and their business won't be impacted.
If it is a series of scams not reporting just creates more suckers down the road to get taken.
This is a common occurrence in my experience. Over the course of three houses, I’ve been told several times that our A/C’s were shot and needed to be replaced. On second opinions, a minor repair was able to rectify each situation. I’ve never had to replace one. Friends have had similar experience. The economic incentive is to sell you a multi-$10k new install over a $20 part and a $200 service charge.
I second everything here. The average level of competence and honesty in any form of contracting is absurdly low. I've always attributed it to us a a society spending decades actively discouraging anyone who seems competent and capable of learning skills effectively as a kid from going into anything resembling a trade as an adult.
Edit to add: local laws (licensing, permitting, inspection processes, and so on) also make a huge difference, and in my experience there's a tremendous amount of value locked up in professionals knowing how to navigate the local bureaucracy because they know what the local officials think the written rules *really* mean.