A Conundrum and Pespective

I have worked both sides of the street; as a supervisor and as a hourly employee. I have worked in retail, restaurants, as a laborer, and supervised 30-50 employees. I have been responsible for setting sale prices after factoring in the wholesale cost and submitted and ran budgets for whole departments. I say all this so that you know my background and the basis for my opinion(s). I realize that folks have to make a living and I am willing to pay them for their expertise. To me it's kind of like paying for a meal-if it's over a certain amount it better knock my socks off. Time after time we have paid for goods and services and not been satisfied. We paid a technician a ton of money to repair our heat pump and it ran all of twenty minutes before quitting. And we removed the unit and delivered it to him; which was no small task! I guess I wouldn't succeed out there because I would have offered to remove the unit and repair it to make things right. This guy wants me to remove the unit to facilitate the repair and reinstall it when he's done. If I wasn't paying him it might not be such a big deal. What set me off today is that our second heat pump is also not working and he has diagnosed it as needing a hard start kit. He quoted me $250 if I removed and opened it up for him. A friend and I were chatting later that day and he said "Why don't you install the kit yourself?" Well, I made a call to the local RV supply shop and its going to cost me less than $20 to get the kit. In my humble opinion, the disparity is not worth the techs expertise. The problem in a nutshell is that I've spent a ton of money trying to get the heat pumps operating and, at some point, I have to cut my losses. I paid another technician/mechanic a goodly sum of money to go over my entire engine and ensure that it would not overheat or breakdown on me. If I get an uninterrupted good run out of it I will call it money well spent. See; I'm not so difficult. The whole mentality by repair shops and dealers that owners of boats and RV's can afford to pay higher prices for parts and repairs is aggravating to me. I also watched my father pay premium prices to keep his sport fisherman running. All you entrepreneurs out there listen up! There is a demand for honest, fair priced, mechanics and parts sales out there. Never buy anything for your RV or boat before shopping around!