Shop Adopts Policy: Customer-Supplied Part Goes On, Customer-Supplied Warranty Stays Off

Notice 19-B went up above the Parts Desk at 7:40 on a Monday, and by 8:05 Dorian Marrow had read it twice out loud, which is how the rest of the shop found out about it.

The notice is eleven lines long. It reads, in order: the shop will install a customer-supplied part when the customer requests it in writing; the warranty on said part remains with said part; the shop warrants its labor against defects in its labor; and no further discussion of the warranty will occur while the vehicle is in the bay.

Line nine, the service writers' favorite, states that a part supplied by the customer is a part supplied by the customer, and that the shop has no relationship with it, its seller, or the listing under which it was sold.

The notice has a history. The pump in question arrived in a box that matched no number in the catalog, weighed nine ounces less than the unit it displaced, and shipped with a gasket sized for a different casting. It went in on a Thursday and left the following Tuesday on a flatbed, the customer insisting it had been "exactly as described." RO 41-3382, dated 12 March, records the return visit; the description said "high quality, OEM equivalent." The invoice that day ran 0.4 hours of diagnostic time that nobody billed.

Under Kaito's Old Receipts, this is not a new argument. The first customer-supplied-part complaint in this shop's file predates the current Parts Desk by eleven years and concerns a capacitor, and it was settled the same way: the shop pays for the thought, the marketplace pays for the metal, and neither one collects.

The accounting is plain. A warranty part arrives free and gets returned in an envelope; a customer part arrives paid and gets returned in an argument. The flat-rate tech eats the removal either way. Line seven attempts to price that: reinstallation of a failed customer-supplied component is labor billed at the customer's rate, not the shop's goodwill.

Quentin Sato's group across town adopted nearly identical language within a fortnight, differing in one word. Sato's says "declines." Ours says "warrants," because ours was written by someone who expects to be asked again.

The last customer to read Notice 19-B in full asked whether a part can come with no warranty at all. The answer was that it arrives with whatever the seller gave it, that the seller was four states away behind a marketplace banner, and that the shop once tried to call such a seller and reached a return portal.

Line eleven, in full: the shop will install the part. The shop will not inherit it.

Marrow has stopped reading the notice aloud. He says he has memorized it, which the shop takes as evidence the policy is working and Marrow means as a complaint, filed with the laminator rather than the front office.