All of our local plumbers and electricians were bought out by a PE firm and merged together.
So now to call the electrician, I need to be a “member” and pay $25/mo (annual commitment billed monthly) for the privilege of calling their call center to schedule an appointment.
They offer “free plumbing inspections” annually as a way to find problems to charge you to fix.
Private equity is an underrated danger to society.
So I call...
They "are having trouble" finding someone for "emergency service". Their idea of "emergency service" is "we have a company that will be out there in four WEEKS".
So I found someone who could come out that day, for a surcharge. Reasonable. And the AC was dead. But this company were nice - the tech said "no promises, no commitments" and he did some shifty magic and got it running for about six more hours before it was permanently to the graveyard.
So we started getting quotes for a new HVAC system.
Responses from the plan:
- we won't pay if you don't use our suppliers
- we won't pay if you don't choose from our list of models (which were all low end, 80%, 1 stage systems)
- even if you use our supplier, we won't pay above $X. If they quote you higher, the difference is on you.
- if you used another contractor for ANY maintenance work on the existing system, we won't pay
- if the maintenance schedule wasn't followed (whether you owned the system/property at the time), we won't pay
There's a common phrase in each of those statements.
So maybe the solution is to ask the electrician, etc, if you can contact them directly next time, and to ask them if they know any other tradespeople when you need one.
These are people who never had an exit opportunity before finally finding a way to sell their business for a nice lumpsum, instead of having to live job to job.
The only losers here are the customers and some of the employees, especially those who are undocumented.
