The True Cost of Outsourcing Repair

"They don't make anything in that town now." -Donovan Woods

I recently came across a short essay by the late Roger Scruton entitled The Art of Motor-Cycle Maintenance in which he laments the contemporary lack of repairers and repair-worthy items. “Repair was not so much a habit as an honored custom,” writes Scruton. “Every town, every village, had its cobbler, its carpenter, its wheelwright and its smith. In each community people supported repairers, who in turn supported things. And our surnames testify to the honor in which their occupations were held. But to where have they repaired, these people who guaranteed the friendliness of objects? With great difficulty you may still find a cobbler—but for the price of his work you could probably buy a new pair of shoes. For the cost of 15 digital watches, you may sometimes find a person who will fix the mainspring of your grandfather’s timepiece.”

I have seen a similar shift in the automotive and trucking industry over the last several decades. It was not all that long ago that many parts for your car or truck could be fixed locally, rebuilt, or made anew. Rotors were cut, alternator or starter windings were rewound and diodes replaced, radiators were soldered and pressure tested, transmissions were taken out, repaired and reinstalled.

We do not do this anymore. Now you have two basic options: 1) a new cheap part or 2) remanufactured part. All of these parts are either built or remaned in faraway shops by faceless technicians. We have essentially outsourced repair.

The performance of local repair has gone away as more and more production was outsourced and brand-new or remanufactured parts became cheaper and cheaper. Even in my own shop, we often replace blown engines or transmissions with remanufactured ones that come from out of state. We are told that this is the most time and cost-effective method of repair.

What we have gained in terms of time and cost, we’ve lost in other ways. I can think of at least 3 particular losses.

Loss of system reliability

As efficient as outsourcing is supposed to be, I have seen many issues caused by the massive bureaucracy needed to produce and mobilize these parts. At our shop, we do a lot of work for FedEx. A year ago, we needed parts for a converter dolly (the piece that connects two trailers together when hauling doubles). All that was needed were some simple brackets that bolt to the front of the dolly and prop it up while it sits in the parking lot unused. When we tried to source these parts directly from Hyundai, we were not able to order them. The software that Hyundai used was hacked. The parts personnel had no way of accessing their own inventory and thus could not sell us anything. A million parts sat on warehouse shelves but because of a server takeover, they became phantoms. We ended up fabricating new brackets ourselves. Mechanics—1, Hackers—0.

This is not an isolated incident, happening nearly every other day. Computer glitches or ransom attacks have become a standard liability across the industry. More recently, the system experienced a cyberattack on CDK Global, a software company that provides services for dealerships across the country. Cars sat on lots unable to be sold. Access to parts and inventory vanished. It’s all fun and games until you have to explain to an old school trucker that his mirror, which is probably on the shelf at the dealership, is going to take a week to come in because some techie 4,000 miles away hacked some database 2,000 miles away. I made sure to break the news from a safe distance.

Loss of quality

In addition to fragile supply chains, the issue of quality is one we contend with on a daily basis. An unbelievable percentage of the parts we receive are failures. Some of this, I believe, can be explained by the depersonalization that occurs when you move production and repair outside of the community of use.

Not long ago we received a remanufactured six-speed transmission for an International step van. The transmission was worn and would constantly pop out of second gear. We swapped in the reman transmission and test drove the truck only to find out that this replacement was now popping out of third gear. We contacted the company who sent yet another and we did the entire job a second time. In this instance, our labor was covered by the company’s “guarantee.” But after you perform a job two or three times, you start to really wonder what the guarantee is worth.

I have come to realize that “guarantees” and “warranties” are just anemic bureaucratic substitutes for a stronger concept of “my word.” The transmission I receive from a reman company is wholly different than one that I get back from my buddy Butch Albright, the transmission expert in town. While large companies assume a certain percentage of failure as just “the cost of doing business”, Butch has no vision of failure when he puts something together for me. I am not just a customer number to him. I have borrowed tools from him. I drink beer with him when I swing by his shop at closing time. I have been to funerals with him and to his step-daughter’s baby shower. When Butch rebuilds something for me, I have far more than a guarantee or warranty—I have his word. He is not working out of a unit per hour paradigm when he exercises his skill in the service of my broken part. Of course, he charges, and he gets paid. But his main priority is to do good work. I know that if I have a problem, I can drive over to his shop and talk to him. I do not need to dial a 1-800 number and listen to that annoyingly fake voice say, “Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed.” I do not need to provide him an invoice number before he can remember the job.

Part of the reason I believe that outsourcing often produces poorer quality parts is that the ramifications of producing bad parts is relatively abstract when you are miles away from the community and place in which that part performs. In a faraway facility, a manager holds a clipboard at the beginning of a shift and goes over this month’s production to failure ratio. Maybe the target won’t be met this month. Maybe you won’t receive your bonus or cookout or pizza party—whatever HR has deemed the appropriate reward for whatever ratio equals “good work.” Otherwise, you go home and place your head on your pillow blissfully unaware that your failed part has halted a real ambulance, delivery truck, or tow truck and that real people with real names and families have been failed by that part. Butch is not unaware. He knows that many of the trucks we work on deliver packages to his friends and supply sea food to our restaurants. He knows what it means to have a truck down longer than planned or to have to do a job again. He is motivated by far more than even a paycheck or an excel spreadsheet and his connection to his work and to me are deeply personal.

Loss of local capacities

When we outsource the production or repair of our goods, the local skills and capacities concerned with the maintenance and repair of our things begins to atrophy. While I am a young millennial, I am old enough to remember the TV I grew up watching. It was the kind that sat on the floor with a wooden box built around it. We probably owned the TV ten or more years when the tuner stopped working and the screen showed eternal static. My dad and I then muscled it up the stairs from the basement and into the back of the truck. We dropped it off at the TV and appliance repair shop. It was fixed after a week or two and back in our home where we enjoyed it for at least another five years, way into the flat screen era.

You would be hard pressed to find many of these repair shops today, let alone the repairmen that once worked in them. Sure, it seems that smartphone and tablet repair can be found in any strip mall, promising to replace cracked screens or a broken camera lens in an hour or less (surely we cannot be without our Gorilla Glass talismans for very long). But try to find a someone who can do rust repair on your car or fix your grandfather’s pocket watch or resole your most faithful pair of boots. Hell, try to find a new pair of boots that will be worth resoling.

Outsourcing production has rewarded us with cheap goods but has also degraded local skill and capacities. My father used to tear down big, manual transmissions like clockwork “back in the day.” Conversely, I have seldom seen a worn sliding clutch or synchronizer or timed dual countershafts or felt the worn friction surface on a high/low range assembly with my own hands. Yet these parts that I have never repaired are not obscure relics of an age gone by. They are in thousands and thousands of trucks that are driven across the country every day. Yet, fewer and fewer people know how to work on them. We have sent our parts away to be repaired and all intimate knowledge of how it works went with it to some far-off place probably owned by shareholders and run by men in glass and steel towers. This contributes to the Machine’s tendency to accumulate our capacities for control by smaller and smaller sets of people.

What it looks like to crawl around underneath an old Mack truck for a day

The reality of repair is that it is seldom easy. It takes a lot of time and energy to troubleshoot and fix worn and broken things. It also takes a lot of time and energy to develop the eyes to see and the hands to feel what is worn and broken. The “spirit” of repair has been faltering for some time.  As Scruton says in the same article, “The truth is that repair, like every serious social activity, has its ethos, and when that ethos is lost, no amount of slap-dash labor can make up for it. The person who repairs must love the broken object, and must love also the process of repair and all that pertains to it.”

While we may not be able to revive this ethos on mass scale overnight, there are ways in which we can foster the spirit of repair in our own lives and in our communities. Even while living in The Machine, I am not without examples of hope. I know a local carpenter who has spent a lot of time rebuilding kitchens. People are always surprised when they see that he still builds the cabinets himself instead of sourcing premade ones. “I have started to buy the doors,” he told me once. “But I just don’t see how I can stop making the cabinets themselves. If I did that, how could I call myself a cabinet maker?” For him, any gains that could be realized by outsourcing this task are more than offset by the loss of his own capacities and thus job title. In the a world of prefabbed cabinets, he continues to build his from scratch.

Perhaps one way to subvert The Machine and develop the capacities needed to flourish is to learn to repair our own.