If I could, I’d send everyone in the auto glass industry a box of blueberries. Why? Because blueberries are supposed to be good for the memory, and our industry seems to have the lowest ability to remember anything of any industry I have ever seen. Our auto glass shop owners make the guy from the movie Momentum look like a recall genius.
I figure that’s got to be what’s wrong with us. We have no memory. Or maybe it’s getting zapped the way Will Smith zapped Tommy Lee Jones’ memories in Men in Black (yeah, I watch a lot of movies). That must be it.
How else can you explain an amazing phenomena? In 2005, NAGS “revalued” its pricing system. At that time, they told us they were moving from a NAGS price that had included parts, labor and the kitchen sink and moving to a model that was akin to that used by the collision and mechanical repair industries. There would be a part price (i.e., the cost of the glass) and a labor charge. While NAGS could not tell us what to charge, they did remind us that those same collision and mechanical repair shops had an hourly rate for labor and did, in fact, charge by the man hour. While NAGS could not tell us what to charge, we knew that most body shops did not discount their parts all that much.
The intent, I believe, was to morph NAGS pricing into a “part + labor” equation. Articles were written, lectures given and the same caution went out over and over again: this new NAGS system will work, if people truly looked at their costs. They wouldn’t discount parts too much as the part prices were pretty accurate, and they would charge a fair labor rate per hour.
Miraculously, most insurers went along. Only one stayed with a flat labor rate, the rest went to hourly ones. Most insurers “offered” four and five percent off NAGS prices. There was great hope in the industry—for a while.Three years later, I am sure nobody remembers this. How else could we explain the fact that insurers are offering 45 percent off, and people are accepting it? It must be memory loss, because why else would anyone who had been paid an hourly rate for labor now accept a flat rate? Why would an industry go backwards?Now, here’s the part in the story where everyone blames NAGS. It must be their fault, they say, for putting out pricing so out of line that people take 45 percent off. Well, I’m not going to argue that, because I don’t think the problem is NAGS. The problem is us. Every time someone does work at a certain percentage off, the argument that work can’t be done for that price is shown to be untrue. NAGS has nothing to do with it.
The problem is us. We must not—collectively or individually—have any memory left. Because the alternate reason—the one that says we choose to let this happen—shows me that rather than not having any memory, we just may not have any brains.
