Parts swapping / "cherry picking" during service

[TEG]

I am dismayed to hear anecdotal stories about Roadsters sent in for service only to be returned with bad parts unrelated to the problem for which they were sent in.

There are signs that some shops may have "robbed Peter to pay Paul" by pulling a good working part out of a car that was brought in for some other problem.

Let's say you are a shop and you get 2 Roadsters in for service. Roadster A has problem A and Roadster B has problem B. Turns out parts for A & B are no longer available...
It would be tempting to take good part A from car B and put it in car A so at least one of the cars get "fixed" and returned to a happy customer quickly. Then all you need to do is make customer B wait a while longer until you can get replacements for both part A & B. But then it is a disservice to customer B if part B comes in first and now they are waiting for part A to arrive which they never needed in the first place. And this strategy could turn ugly if car B becomes a donor for car C as well. The shops playing "musical parts" might be tempted to gauge how willing a customer would be to wait a long time for their car and start cherry picking from it until it is so far gone they have no chance of fixing it anymore.

 

[glide]

Soooo…theft?

 

[Tex EV]

There's an infamous performance shop in Texas (won't name them, but the internet remembers) that did something similar with customer cars. Out of state vehicles were tossed to the back of the line. Expensive OEM parts (e.g. Viper hoods) were taken and sold to fund work on other projects in the backlog. Customers would show up months after "work began" to find their cars disassembled and left in a corner. Not cool.

 

[IslandRoadster]

There's an infamous performance shop in Texas (won't name them, but the internet remembers) that did something similar with customer cars. Out of state vehicles were tossed to the back of the line. Expensive OEM parts (e.g. Viper hoods) were taken and sold to fund work on other projects in the backlog. Customers would show up months after "work began" to find their cars disassembled and left in a corner. Not cool.

a pyramid scheme of car parts!