I have the misfortune of also being witness to a lot of shittiness happening to my coworkers and bosses. So it's not just me, we all get treated equally shitty by the general public, which is my only assurance that I'm not doing something terribly wrong.
So this guy comes in today with some motley pice of crap on his forearm. The red was choppy and blotchy and he wanted to know how much to fill it in again. My boss took a peek and said "Fifty bucks."
He jerked his arm back and said, "For what?"
Let me stop right there. Here is the question: 'how much?' Here is the answer: 'fifty bucks'. Where is the confusion there? I see nothing to be puzzled about. And that exchange happens more often than one might think. "How much to fix this?" they ask, showing us some scribbly, homemade piece of crap. And when we give a price, the inevitable answer is "For WHAT?" As if somehow we are going to take their fifty bucks, pocket it, smile and say, "Okay, now get the fuck out." The price we gave you is to fix the tattoo you just showed us. Where are you getting lost?
And the reasoning for such asshattery is this: The price we are charging for the fixup is always more than they paid for the original tattoo. And this tattoo, might I remind you, looks like crap and they hate it, and they want us to fix it. Yet they are astonished that we would dare to charge more than the garage monkey with a walkman motor for a tattoo machine who fucked it up in the first place.
So this guy who was just quoted fifty bucks and replied with "for what" came back with, "I only paid sixty for the whole thing. To which my boss replied that this was the problem with the tattoo in the first place; it was a cheap, homemade piece of garbage, which we didn't do in the first place. We had no obligation to fix it for less than the original price, or for free. We have rent to pay and supplies to buy. Fifty dollars is a small price to pay for something that will be on you forever and will look good. I am appalled at the very idea that people have the gall to come in and demand that we, none of whom have been doing this for less than ten years, work for less money than some yahoo in his apartment with a homemade rig.
People, please. When you get a tattoo, you're paying for the experience. You're paying for the quality. Why does a steak at the fanciest joint in town cost 60 dollars? Because you're paying for the cooking skill of the executive chef who studied in Paris for fifteen years and is cooking you a twenty dollar steak on a stove that cost 15 thousand dollars. Why does the steak at Denny's cost eleven dollars? Because it's a three dollar cut of meat prepared on a ramshackle grill by an illegal alien or a highschool dropout. It's that simple. They are two different things. My tattoos and the tattoos that your friend does in his house on trade for cigarettes are not the same.
Needless to say, my boss and this dude had words and he left. Good riddance. He can go back to his friendly neighborhood butcher and have him fix it. I wonder if he knows how much the treatment for staph infections are. I don't like to wish bad on people. But I really wish more people like him had to find out just that. After a 10K hospital stay and a course of antibiotics and the tattoo still looks like crap, maybe then they'd understand that fifty bucks is for forever.
