Had a customer try to tell me I was ripping him off on paint match...

This guy rolls in last Tuesday with a 2015 blue sedan, wants a front bumper respray. I pull out the spectrophotometer, take a reading, mix up a test batch. He watches me the whole time, then says "that doesn't look right, I saw the same car at a dealer and their color was darker." I offered to let him watch me spray a test card, even bring it outside in the sun. He kept arguing for 10 minutes until I finally asked him to show me a picture of the dealer job. He pulls up his phone and it's clearly a different shade of blue entirely, like a model year or two off. I had to politely explain that manufacturers change shades between years, sometimes even mid-year. He got real quiet, paid for the job, and left without another word. Anyone else ever had a customer who thinks they know your job better than you do?

3 comments

3 Comments

wendyk5626d ago

And that right there is the problem, people don't trust the tools or the process. They think their eyes and memory are better than a machine that reads the actual paint. Glad he finally figured it out and shut up.

chen.adam26d ago

Got my dad one of those paint matched tools for his classic car project. He spent weeks insisting the original color was some shade of green I'd never seen before. The tool measured it and it came back as a standard dark blue. He argued with the thing for days, kept saying the lighting was wrong or the sensor was dirty. Finally brought a sample to the paint shop and they matched it right to that blue. He never mentioned it again but I caught him checking the tool on every other part of the car after that. Sometimes people just need to hit the wall themselves before they believe the data.

reese12426d ago

Bet your dad's eyes are calibrated perfectly now, huh? That blue vs. green thing is wild, I wonder how many other classic car projects are running around with the wrong colors because someone swore they could "see" it.