‘High Profile’ Repair Shop Quotes Man $1,200 For New Part. It Costs $150, Takes 30 Minutes To Install—That’s Not The Worst Part

A Vermont mechanic says another shop quoted one of his customers $1,264.40 to replace a muffler that, by his count, costs a repair shop $157 and takes under half an hour to fix. The bigger problem, he says, is that the customer didn’t need a new muffler at all.

mainly_mechanics (@mainly_mechanics), whose TikTok channel is mostly about his work, tagged the video at TJ’s Auto Repair in Burlington, Vermont, and wears its logo on his hoodie. So far it has been viewed more than 2,400 times.

“This is how SHOPS RIP YOU OFF…literally STEALING your money!” reads the text on screen, and his caption says the customer “paid a quarter of the amount at my shop compared to what the other place quoted him.”

“This is one of the many, many, many ways that a high-profile repair shop was going to rip off this customer,” he says. He doesn’t name the shop, but he holds up its written estimate. “Muffler assembly, $1,082. The gasket for it, $17. And the nuts and bolts, $4.24,” he reads. With 0.8 hours of labor at $199.99 an hour, the line came to $1,264.40. The estimate’s note reads “rear muffler is rusted and leaks will fail VSI,” referring to Vermont’s state inspection standard.

Then he turns to the replacement muffler’s box, where he had written out the numbers. “My price as a business, I can get it at $157,” he says. “The customer can buy it himself over the counter for $167. The list price is $284. That’s the suggested retail price.” Fitting it, he says, means undoing two nuts, freeing it from three hangers, and then you “put the new one into the hangers and bolt it back up, and the job’s done. Less than a half an hour, right?”

But Did He Even Need A Muffler?

Under the car, he points to the old muffler. “It’s leaking right there at the gasket. But look at the rest of it,” he says. “No rust through, no holes, no noise, no nothing.” It “doesn’t look any worse than this one that they were trying to sell him for a $925 profit,” he adds, using the gap between the estimate’s $1,082.67 and the $157.05 cost he wrote on the box.

“So not only were they going to charge him $1,264 and make over $1,000 on them,” he says, “but they were doing it on a part that he didn’t even need.”

The same estimate also listed rear brakes, a tie rod with an alignment and a brake fluid exchange. He didn’t comment on those.

What Vermont’s Inspectors Check

A leak alone can fail a Vermont inspection. The state’s inspection rules say a car is rejected if “there are nonmanufactured holes or leaks in the exhaust system from cylinder head to the tailpipe.” The next line, though, says that “repairs with equal or greater material than that commonly used in the manufacturing of exhaust systems are permitted,” so the rule doesn’t demand a new muffler where a repair does the job.

The video doesn’t say what car it was, or whether the $1,082.67 muffler on the estimate was a factory part. New parts “generally are made to original manufacturer’s specifications, either by the vehicle manufacturer or an independent company,” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says, and “prices and quality of these parts vary.”

The customer did what the FTC recommends. “If you need expensive or complicated repairs, or if you have questions about recommended work, consider getting a second opinion,” it advises, and ask for a written estimate that should “identify the condition to be repaired, the parts needed, and the anticipated labor charge.”

“Not All Shops Are Rip-Offs”

“As a former euro auto mechanic, I commend you for showing the public not all shops are rip-offs and how to spot the ones that are,” wrote vbeanert. “Thank you!” the creator replied.

Others recognized the pattern.

“I saw this two weeks too late. Pretty sure I got totally ripped off when I went for an inspection and suddenly needed a muffler,” wrote mommaday13, who added that they had also paid $350 for a diagnostic “resulting in the same thing AutoZone told me for free.” “I got taken two years ago for 5K to repair my transmission,” wrote anna15sag.

danielleitta_0831 had the opposite experience. A transmission shop that looked at their Grand Prix for hard shifting advised against a rebuild, they wrote, and didn’t charge for the inspection. “I was at 175K then, now I’m almost at 400K with the same car,” they wrote. “Glad to know there are some good mechanics out there!”

Motor1 reached out to mainly_mechanics via TikTok direct message for comment. We’ll be sure to update this if they respond.