Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Every market where one side transacts constantly and the other transacts twice ends up like this. Estate agents. Garages. Funerals, most of all. It is not a moral failure of tradespeople, it is a structural feature of buying something rarely.
1 response in depends
Repeat business does fix some of it. Every good tradesperson I know works almost entirely on recommendation, and their behaviour is completely different because the next ten jobs depend on this one.
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