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[Kevin]

Your relationship with a Garage (and any other service-oriented repair business) should always remain adversarial.

I agree that you should phone around for ballpark numbers, if not take it in to have an estimated done (unless getting the estimate costs you, which it shouldn't).

But I don't agree with having an adversarial relationship with the service provider. Being cautious and not blindly accepting the offer is a good idea. Doing checks on the work is a good idea, but that doesn't require being adversarial. That just requires being smart and at least partially thorough. You can build a solid relationship with a service provider and you can have and should have trust in the work they do and the prices they quote you. Having been a self employed service provider before, there were times where I simply couldn't beat a competitors price and still break even on the job for numerous reasons (different dealers, different equipment sets, different wholesale prices, they simply charged cheaper per hour labor for that type of work because it was their speciality, etc). In those cases I would tell my customers who I had built good relationships with, why it was more expensive for me to do the work and suggest that they get it done for less. Heck even the people who got all confrontational all the time I would usually be nice to as well since that is just good for business. In some cases I would lower labor charges, in some cases the customer would have me do the work at my higher price, in some cases the customers would do the work elsewhere but come back to me for other future work.

But just because you shop around and check work sets, doesn't mean the relationship has to be adversarial. Maybe I just have a differnet connotation set for that word than others and maybe we are in complete agreement on this except for verbiage.