at the corporate store i worked at (owned by sopus) techs were started at about $7/hr. if you were there long enough or complained long enough you might get up to about $10/hr. i was at the supervisor level and i was only making $9/hr, and was a little upset when i learned that someone that was below me was making a dollar more per hour than me.
the franchise store i worked at started people out at about $6.5/hr. when i left there i was making as much as a tech could make at that store, about $8.5/hr. the supervisor only got a little more than that per hour, dont know exacts but was always curious.
there werent many major screw ups, mainly little stuff like damaged threads. every now and again a filter would be put on that was missing a gasket. it used to be that on occasion the wrong oil filter was put on a vehicle. but now they have new procedures that if followed should eliminate that.
one time a ph3600 was put on a 4.3l blazer instead of a ph3980. when this is done the filter will seal fine for a few miles, maybe a hundred or so, or it will go the entire oil change without a problem but they can "spontaniously combust" for lack of a better term. all of a sudden it will just come off. and then of course most people wouldnt realize it and it kills the motor. that is what happened in this case and of course we had to buy a motor.
but then some claims are bogus. one time someone said that we did not put the rear diff fill plug back in and the diff blew up. but it was well know through out the shop that the guy who did the stuff under the car did not check anything under the car, just tended to the oil plug and filter. but we couldnt say that so we might have ended up buying a diff for, coincidentally, another blazer.
one time we did the oil change on one of the ecotec motors, might have been in a saturn. somehow that plastic cap got cracked and sprayed oil everywhere under the hood. had to get a new cap.
a lot of times the issue was the oil cap was left off, thus coating the underhood area on many cars.
i think we had more customer service complaints than mechanical issues.
a few places use stuff called tamper seal. it is a yellow or blue paint that they put on any plug that they touch so that they can tell if the plug was tampered with in the event of a claim. i always tried to use it but a lot of times the manager wouldnt buy the stuff or people would abuse it and the stuff would run out before the next order came in.
