Barber420 $30./hr is the cheapest rate I've seen for labor around here. $60./hr is what the most sucessful LHS charges though. And standard car repairs, the good shops charge $90./hr for labor or more. Maybe just the Cost-of-Living is higher around here though.

It never surprises me how mechanically inept modern people can be. I remember the time I was in a LHS with a dirt field out back and a guy who doesn't understand how to remove the body from his car came in twice, both times accusing the LHS guy of 'breaking' his car. Body clips, for goodness sakes! How hard is it to put on or remove a body clip to secure the body. There's people who can't even do that. Expecting them to do something we think of as 'simple', change a pinion gear or even understand what a gear ratio is way too much.

As the hobby grows, more and more everyday, mechanically inept people get into it. I've seen the same thing happen with paintball for instance. It used to be everyone knew how to field-strip their gun, how to do the common maintainance, etc. It was just a given. If you did not know how, you learned from a buddy and eventually developed those skills yourself. Today the hobby has grown, but the aptitude of the common player in doing these things has gone down. Many of these new people have the money and they don't want to spend the time to learn themselves. The same thing has happened with computing, with photography, etc. Today you have people who don't even realise the lens on an SLR can be changed or how to do it for their particular camera. They don't know what aperture is or what significance it shares with depth-of-field in photography. It happens as hobbies grow or mature and it's not necessarily a bad thing, in this case it's the life-blood of Local Hobby Shops, allowing them to survive in the modern world.