I took my car to a corporate body shop and they wanted $1200 to replace my back tail light that somebody hit. $400 for the part and $800 for labor. And it had a bunch of other random stuff on the estimate that I just didn’t understand. So I bought a used one that looked like it was ripped off of a car for about 140 bucks on eBay. I took apart my back bumper by myself with a hexagon screwdriver thing. Then did the same for the broken taillight. Installed the one that the crackhead probably stole from a car and put it back together in under 30 minutes.
$140 versus $1200 and I really don’t know anything about cars. I just winged it the entire time. Fucking collision shops are one hell of a racket.
No crazy repair stories but some crazy quotes when I built our house a few years ago. Best one was a sandstone retaining wall. 3x quotes for an identical wall - 30k, 40k and 75k… Some people really take the piss.