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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Every time I employ a tradesman to fix something around here, I get an astonishingly high bill.

The company sending you a high bill doesn't automatically mean the guy who fixed your house gets paid well though, does it?

They were one man shops.

20 years ago, the going rate for installing a socket in an existing wired and ready to go junction box was $50. It's about a 5 minute job. I know it's about 5 minutes because I've done a lot of them myself.

I'm sure prices have gone up a lot in the last couple decades.

The electrician is not charging to do a 5 minute job. They do not know that when they accept the job over the phone.

They are charging for their time to drive to and from you, the possibility that the job is more involved than described, and the liability from doing the job. And the opportunity cost of not accepting a different job due to your job.

That's the price I was quoted to do the whole house, not one socket. $50 per outlet.

If I hired one to come out and do one socket, I'd be sure to get a $200 site visit charge added on.

This is what a contractor does when he doesn't want the job because it's basically too small and would be more of an annoyance than anything worth doing. Bid an outrageous amount and then if the client says "yes" at least you're making some money.

He's probably got a backlog of large jobs he can make more money on. So if he's going to come out and do outlet installation on one house, he's going to bid an amount that is worth delaying other work.

For small/simple household jobs, you should call a handyman not a trade contractor.

I can confirm that is the the going rate right now.

FWIW I paid about $100 an outlet recently (as part of a much larger project). Yes you can get 99 cent receptacles at Home Depot, yes they will be crap (residential grade) and likely not up to code. NEC requires all circuits in the kitchen and bathroom be GFCI protected, and all kitchen outlets to also be tamper resistant. A GFCI, non-TR receptacle costs bout $15 at Home Depot, and again you're talking bargain basement units that a professional electrician may not want to install for risk of having to eat the cost of a return visit. Commercial and hospital grade outlets both cost more ($30+, $50+ respectively for tamper resistant GFCI). The outlets with USB A+C ports start at around $60 per.

In some jurisdictions you may be able to get away with one GFCI outlet per circuit, but then you're paying for their time to map out which circuits are which.

To be clear, the $50 was labor only.

Twenty years ago I'd expect $50 to cover materials and labor. Prices have exploded in the past couple years.

It's hardly surprising that a 5 minute job that requires travel to and from the customer site on your own dime costs enough to cover their travel time & costs; 20 years ago they had to read a map, plan a route to their jobs for the day, drive to and from the site.

You're going to pay for a couple of hours no matter what. He isn't just getting salary either. There's employment taxes that need to be paid, tools and transportation costs, insurance, benefits, etc.

One thing about contractors is that you're paying them for the time they aren't working.

As in, they're probably not working steadily, 40 hours a week, every week, but they still have bills to pay, and this down time must be factored into their rates for the profession to be sustainable.

On the other hand, if they DO work 40 hours a week, every single week, they can probably afford to raise their rates...

Have not been an electrician, but I have been a software contractor, and the idea is the same.

As a programmer who sometimes does contract work, I know how that works.

Then do it yourself. I change my own oil and filters. They're able to charge that much because plenty of people can't do it themselves.

But the reality is they've also got the businesses expenses of maintaining their work vehicle, their insurance, their healthcare, etc. That $50 probably only translates to $20 into usable income.

Having done one myself, I blew off the fuses and burned some wires, because I bought a wrong thing,so yeah, it's a 5 min job but you still need to know what to do.

Interestingly, in my experience the difference between company quotes and owner-operator quotes are that the companies are somehow cheaper.

They need to cover the contingency. You don't expect them to be scheduled back to back from 9 to 5 each day.

Yeah because you are paying for more than just their work on site. You are paying their commute, their time taking calls and finding bids, the maintenance on their vehicles, extra gas because they aren't transporting ladders in a focus, the maintenance and replacement of tools, their insurance, savings for market downturns, etc.

I like to imagine the costs for software changes. “Wow, the company just paid me $x00 to rearrange some fields on a form”

There is an old joke about a doctor who calls a plumber.

He gets the bill and says "That's outrageous, that's more than I make as a doctor".

The plumber replies "Yeah that's more than I made as a doctor too."

The last time I called a plumber they ran a power snake about 60 feet down the sanitary line and cut out a pretty amazing chunk of tree roots (I called them because water had started to backup into my basement utility sink).

I was pretty happy to pay the 4 or 5 times what the day rental for machine would have been. Took em about 25 minutes.

They are like meaty unreserved cloud resources. You want to call a plumber at any time and they drive out with their expertise, their $200k of vehicle and equipment, insurances and fix something. It will cost!

This is the cost of not having a social safety net and public services, where everybody pays a little bit and everybody benefits. It's not just the people who are self-employed that benefit. Their customers also benefit from lower prices, because self-employed people don't have such high expenses. Of course, it all gets paid for eventually anyway, but consistently over time, and ideally proportional to wealth and/or income, rather than randomly punishing people who happen to need repair work done.

Their income would be high enough not to benefit from that safety net anyway. You would end up paying the same.

If the parent comment meant universal healthcare, you'd absolutely see the lack of health insurance premiums reflected in prices. As a contractor, it's definitely a chunk of my rate.

But universal healthcare is paid for by taxes on people who earn good money, which these people do. The costs being thrown around in this thread are about on par with the UK anyway.

I explained that in my post. The point is to distribute and dilute these costs consistently over time and across the population.

You miss the point. Universal payer is not the utopia you think it is. People at the bottom may pay less, but people at the top pay more, "distributing and diluting these costs". That results in relatively well earning professions paying high company and income taxes, resulting in identical fees for fitting a socket in the UK (a universal payer society) as the US (a look after yourself society). Ergo, you've shifted the money around but fundamentally haven't changed anything, you carpenter isn't going to work for minimum wage suddenly because his tax burden won't allow it.

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