Flat-Fee Locksmith (total cost named on phone)

Q. If you were a customer, what do you wish you knew about your trade? Any inside secrets to share?

A. Very few locksmiths have shops so if you want to visit a shop, then call ahead of time and make sure someone's there. Whatever address you're seeing might be someone's private home and it's on the internet only because search engines like Google won't list a business without an address. On the whole, the location doesn't matter a lot for mobile services. A locksmith in Lenexa might get to a customer in Olathe faster than a locksmith in Olathe... You can't know without calling and finding out if he's presently available or not.

Almost no legitimate service has a "dispatch center" since all the best companies are still small companies with -- at most -- only a few employees, none of whom are wasting gas driving about the Metro unless there's somewhere particular he needs to be. So your best bet for fast service and an accurate ETA is to talk with the locksmith directly. An added advantage to that is you can often bargain the price, within reasonable limits; there's more give-and-take here than the employees of big corporations can generally provide.

For lockouts, you're paying -- quite literally -- for a "professional break-in artist" with the skill to do the job with zero damage to your property. It's that skilled service you're paying for, and not for labor. This is a point lost on most people, to their detriment. It's very important because the lowballing frauds I've described on my website rely on people's belief that costs are rightly estimated by the labor or time involved, and this way the fraud can easily lie about the labor and raise the price beyond what was estimated on the phone (or he may be laboring at length because of his lack of skill, and not because of your door's lock). So never let anyone tell you the price of a lockout "depends on" the kind of car you have or whether it takes a few minutes more effort... Always get a flat fee price for that particular service, and stop expecting that labor, rather than the service itself, should have anything to do with the cost of lockouts.

Q. Why does your work stand out from others who do what you do?

A. Most locksmiths are honest but a few bad apples -- some recent imports advertising as locksmiths -- are not; they beat other locksmiths for low prices by misleading the customer (aka "lowballing"). Our policy is always to be direct and state upfront the total, final charge on the phone. Our prices are reasonable, the arrival time is fast, the service is skilled, and all your questions are answered forthrightly.

Q. What do you like most about your job?

A. Delivering a skilled service and surprising people with the quick efficiency that makes my job fulfilling for me. Customers get what they pay for - skill and quickness; and I'm proud of my ability to deliver that.

Q. What questions do customers most commonly ask you? What's your answer?

A. How much? and How fast? The quoted price is an exact dollar amount, and it's based on what's necessary to keep the service available to the community. I'll name an ETA as accurately as I can, and generally I'm quite fast to arrive.

Unfortunately customers don't often enough ask "And is that all?" regarding the price. The sneaky ones in this particular business prosper by saying what is the least amount a customer might pay (like "$35 or more depending on labor", or similar), when if they're on their toes customers will want to know the most they might pay.