On occasion I wonder into Best Buy or Staples and see these customers, computers in hand standing in line waiting to pay three times the price for a repair. Right now Best Buy and Staples charge about $189 to do a general inspection and minor repair on a computer. If the problem is at all complicated, then they charge by the hour. According to PC Magazine 2017, the average computer repair person has between one and three years experience in actual computer repair. They pay their technicians so poorly that they are not going to get any real industry professionals.
These places have a “remove and replace” approach to computer repair. If you have a hard drive crash, you remove the hard drive, replace it and load the operating system. I had a customer who was told by a best buy tech that ” he really should replace the ram and the power supply while it was apart”. He was told that the power supply probably caused the hard drive crash. As a computer computer science teacher in college, I was never given a crystal ball that could connect those three issues.
With many computers being so cheap today it is hard to justify paying a lot to repair a serious problem. The only way that an independent computer tech can survive is by cutting costs. I work from my home office and I do a lot of onsite repairs. I have been a computer science teacher in college and have over 10 years working for myself in Idaho and California. I am registered by the state of Idaho, I have an A+ rating at the Better Business Bureau and I am Microsoft certified. Cutting your expenses to the bone is the only way to make a computer repair business work. Even doing better work and charging less for the services cannot overcome the big name businesses like Best Buy. Independent computer service businesses seem to come and go on a regular basis.
There are a few local smaller shops that have been in the area for quite awhile. The minute that you open a brick and mortar business, the prices have to go up. In the Boise area we have a mix of big box stores, medium size businesses as well as some smaller independent shops. It’s up to customers to decide if they are getting what they pay for.