For years my wife and I have been cleaning up the roadside where we live. One major reason we do this is for the exercise it provides… a couple miles of brisk walking plus back and knee bending that keeps us fairly limber despite arthritis issues. Generally speaking, on the relatively upscale, bedroom community of Seattle island where we live, what little trash along our road is Starbucks cups, McDonalds wrappers and plastic salad containers, cigarette wrappers and butts, an occasional beer can or pop bottle, some of those little liquor bottles from plane flights (someone down our road obviously works for an airline), and an occasional syringe. The roads around our home are frequented by spandex-covered bicyclists with their butts high in the air expressing, I can only assume,  their opinion of the rest of us. 

Recently, while spending a few days at a cabin we own on a lake an hour’s drive from home, we decided to get some exercise by cleaning up the trash along the road surrounding the lake. Our lake property is in what might be considered “redneck” country, and the trash here is mostly beer cans and hard liquor bottles (not the teensy little airline type), lots of cigarette packs and “chew” pouches, items of clothing, and lots of fast food wrappers. Whereas the typical form of transportation around our home is a $40+ thousand motorized pedigreed-dog house, the average vehicle around Tee Lake is a 4 x 4 pickup with a gun rack, occasionally with a mongrel in the bed, drooling ecstatically, face to the wind. Generally speaking, folks living near the lake would be much more comfortable in jeans sitting at a bar eating cholesterol-enhanced steak, while many of the folks around my home get all gussied up anywhere from two and seven nights each week to eat at one of the fancy restaurants or bistros, some whose names I have trouble pronouncing. A spandex-coated butt near our lake property would likely be run off of the road at best, possibly shot off of it at worst. I’m quite comfortable abiding in either location, though I tend to be more in touch with the jeans and steak crowd.

Though our warped sense of political correctness may urge us to deny it vehemently, the truth is that human nature dictates that we all to some degree mentally place everyone else we meet in some category or another. Whether a subconscious defense mechanism, a means of making ourselves feel superior, or whatever, we all at least mentally profile or categorize others in relation to ourselves and others we’ve met. It should come as no surprise that your customers and mine do the same concerning us.

So, how do your customers categorize you? How do you measure up in the mind of the vehicle owner? Do they categorize you as just another insurer-dictated robot totally beholden to insurers, or as a true craftsman with the best interests of the vehicle owner in mind?

I was impressed recently upon reading an article written by California shop owner Lee Amaradio. In his piece titled Let’s Do Away With Traction And Body Casts (last autobody news, 9/07), Amaradio cited a conversation he had had in which the insurer rep stated that in the 20+ years she had been an adjuster, shops have been using used weld on structure parts. Her implied suggestion was that since “everybody else is doing it,” he should discontinue insisting on using new-OEM parts, and follow the lead of “everybody else”, making her job easier. Amaradio’s response, as is mine, is that to the shame of the collision industry, just because many shops have for years performed a certain procedure in a certain way on vehicles built with yesterday’s technologies, that doesn’t make that procedure a legitimate method, right, or “best practice” for vehicles built using today’s technologies. Amaradio’s mother, and mine, displayed their motherly wisdom to such absurdities by reasoning with us mush-for-brains, “If everyone else was going to jump off a cliff, would you jump too?”

Unfortunately, it would appear that many within this industry today weren’t blessed with having loving mothers who mentally wrestled the mush from their craniums, replacing it with their own system of good values, honesty, and moral responsibility. Like lemmings, many of those within today’s collision industry will seemingly do anything for anyone for any amount of money, apparently without any worry of any consequences. And insurers are loving it, and monetarily profiting greatly from it! This fatalistic attitude and practice is making it extremely difficult for the seemingly few of us non-lemmings whose sole desire is to repair vehicles aboveboard, be paid fully for our skills, and be assured that the vehicles we repair are structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing. Is that too much to ask?...I don’t believe it should be, do you?