Price Fixers

Price fixers.

Got your attention, didn’t I? That’s good because you are not going to like me after this post. I am going to say some things you don’t want to hear.

That’s because there’s been a lot of comments flying lately about those insurance companies and how they fix prices. You know, the dastards and the way they say they will only pay a certain amount and, worse yet, won’t pay more than that even when we send a bill. They don’t pay us what we deserve or rightfully charge, so they must be fixing prices, right?

Wrong. They are just smart businesspeople—like my wife. My wife is the smartest person I know. She tells me so everyday.

When I was younger, my spouse used to drag me around to garage sales. Man, I hated that.

Every Saturday, we’d go from place to place and buy more junk we didn’t need. You know the drill. Anyway, wifey would see something she liked and saddle on up to the garage sale meister with her usual question, “how much is that?” The “proprietor” would check the price tag on the back and tell her. “Oh, I don’t want to pay that much,” wife-o-mine would swoon. Then she’d counter by naming an amount that was almost always exactly 60 percent of the price on the tag.

Sometimes, when we’d be at one of those gigantic flea markets on Sunday afternoons (hated those things too), she could flit from table to table until she found another spot with exactly the same merchandise and with a proprietor willing to sell it to her at the price she wanted to pay.

Is my wife the price fixer? Did she set the price? She couldn’t, because she was buying. If no one agreed to sell at the price she wanted, she’d have nothing to buy. So, in reality, she was a good opportunist, but no price fixer.In the end, each garage sale holder or flea market exhibitor sets their own prices. They’ve had to make choices. If they didn’t want to come down to my wife’s 60 percent off, they didn’t have to, but they’d lose her business. That’s their choice.

What I’m saying is something you should already know: The reason that insurance companies offer the prices they do is because they can get people to do the work for those prices. And just because you can’t do it for that price, there are others out there who can and do. Some of those guys don’t know their costs and will be out of business hopefully before they take the rest of us with them. Others may buy better or pay less for workers or do something that allows them to have lower expenses. But each makes a conscious decision to accept the amount offered.

Now wait, you say, “Not me. I don’t accept it. When the insurance companies call me with an outrageous offer, I tell them that’s below my rates, or maybe I have to charge for something that they don’t like to pay for (like rust removal), but I don’t accept those rates.”

Here’s where life gets unfair. Most of the courts have held thus far that if you know what someone will pay, and you know they won’t pay more, and you do the work anyway, you have agreed to that price. That’s why the TPAs send you over their forms lickety-split. The only choices you have are to accept the work at their rate or not do the work. That is your only choice but it is YOUR choice nonetheless. And the only way they will change their pricing is when they get to the point where they can’t find anyone to do their work at the price they want to pay.

The reason that those insurers can “set the price” is because the auto glass industry lets them. We sell our profit soul to the devil in exchange for volume.

The way it works isn’t fair. But it is the way it works. If life were fair, we wouldn’t be treated like thieves for charging what we need to. If life were fair, courts wouldn’t say “you knew what they’d pay and you still did the job.” If life were fair, I wouldn’t be scribbling this on a piece of paper waiting for my wife to finish her “shopping” in somebody’s garage.