Word: repairs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That harsh charge was echoed repeatedly during a three-day congressional hearing on the $25 billion-a-year auto-repair industry-a branch of U.S. business that collects an average $250 annually for each of the 100 million cars on U.S. roads. The public hearing followed an eight-month study that faulted the automakers and the nation's 400,000 auto-service outlets for the high cost and low quality of maintenance...
Beating the Book. Among many horror stories uncovered in the investigation was that of a Houston real estate man, who complained that he bought a 1967-model car for $7,000-and has had to return it to the dealer for repairs 27 times. Was the car defective or the repair work ineffective? Probably both. Glenn F. Kriegel, operator of a Denver "diagnostic center" that inspects cars for signs of trouble but does no repairing itself, checked 7,000 cars after they had left service shops in his area; less than 1% of them had been fixed properly, and some...
Auto service is a mess largely because of abuses in the system by which repair shops calculate labor costs. Under the prevailing piecework system, mechanics are paid a set rate for each job rather than an hourly wage. To figure the labor charge, garages rely on "flat-rate" manuals that specify how much time each job should take. Although automakers publish their own flat-rate manuals, many garages prefer to use independent books that list longer work times-and thus higher charges-for each job. Whatever the manual, the cost of labor ordinarily is figured at $7.50 an hour, which...
...group of New England farmers at a town meeting wants to tear down the town's last covered bridge to avoid paying the $3000 needed to keep it in good repair. The town selectmen, however, have different ideas, and manage to swing the meeting over to their side, by reminding them of other possible costs. Cooke writes, $3.000, it was suddenly discovered, looked like a bargain. So they voted it, in theory to preserve the "old wooden covered bridge," in fact as an insurance premium against damage suits and as a bait to hook the nibbling "historical element...
Where Morris L. West's bestseller merely strained credulity, the movie shatters it beyond repair. In Siberia, a political prisoner has been pardoned by Russia's Premier (Laurence Olivier) after 20 years in a slave-labor camp. The freed man is no ordinary convict: he is Kiril Lakota, a tough, Mindszenty-like Slavic archbishop. Lakota has been sprung because Russia and China stand ready to trigger an atomic holocaust. The premier, who just happens to be La-kota's former inquisitor, is desperately gambling that the prelate can somehow persuade the world that the Soviet Union wants...