Local Locksmith near me – Not a drillsmith
A locksmith is a person who works with locks. Working with locks can mean lock installation, lock opening, lock repairing, lock making etc. Locksmith near me is the search that most people use to find a local locksmith.
Locks are found in everyday life on doors, windows, vending machines, garages, caravans, safes, parking barriers, and money boxes. Where something needs to be kept secure because it contains items of value you will inevitably find it is secured behind some sort of lock.
Locks are everywhere to protect possessions and to stop other people gaining entry to places where their presence is not desired.
When we need help opening a lock on a door or window the tendency is to search the internet for locksmith near me or locksmith – followed by place where we are or live, expecting to get the nearest and most local person.
This was noticed around 25 years ago by some corporate thinking people who saw an opportunity and quickly grabbed it by the horns. The national locksmith companies started to emerge.
As the number of national companies has increased this has meant that it is harder to find the locksmith near me you would traditionally find in the Yellow Pages or phone book in your own service area.
The national companies have bigger budgets for advertising and can therefore out gun the smaller business operators.
This means when you search for a locksmith near me, you are more than likely to get a national company. You have seen the usual nationwide companies like Keytek, Lock Rite, Lockforce and others.
The owners of the national companies mean to make profit for themselves as well as their own people that do the work. This means that people who are expecting someone local to do their work, probably will get someone local, but pay up to 20- 50% more for that work.
The other type of ‘national locksmith’
Another type of person saw the opportunity that presented itself when the nationals started taking over. The sharks who have no idea about the locksmith job. What they are good at, they know an opportunity when they see it to relieve people of their hard earned money.
These people quickly realised they could pay someone who is just as poorly skilled as themselves to go out and help people in their hour of need for a very good mark up using minimum skills and maximum destruction for a high price.
The drillsmith was created. This person wants to open any lock open with a drill, maybe a hammer and replace it with a new shiny one but at a highly inflated cost. This is called destructive lock entry.
Unfortunately drillsmiths might also be quite aggressive and know which situations they can lean on you if you dare to question their final costings.
A lot of people do unfortunately hire the drillsmiths just by searching for a locksmith near me.
This is a receipt to gain entry the total cost was nearly £3400 to open a door that a local London locksmith would have charged £500 maximum.
This happens because people have clicked on an expensive advert to reach a national scam company at the top of a Google paid listing. They offered the cheapest looking call out fee and the customer thought they were onto a winner.
Being locked out or distressed about not being able to lock your doors and windows is not the best time people conduct research ordinarily, you are distressed and in a bad situation. Your home is vulnerable or you are vulnerable outside your home. You want to do the right thing by hiring a locksmith near me but the consequences can be devastating.
Bad national locksmith companies do not generally vet anyone who starts to work for them. The industry is not regulated. Meaning, anyone can call themselves a locksmith and start work straight away.
In some cases the workers be lucky to receive 20% of the final job total. It is in their interest to make the job as expensive as possible. Even at 20% of the earnings the drillsmith had a good payday for this job.
You can rest assured it is not going to be cheap for you the customer. You will more than likely pay a call out fee, an inflated price to carry out the work, you will then be hit with the price of new parts.
In most cases people find that they have called a national company even though they knew they had called a local number. You may end up with a locksmith that is local but he is subcontracting for a company based 300 miles away and it is going to cost you more than hiring the same local person direct. He may be the locksmith near me you wanted in the first place.
The cherry on the top is, you will have to pay an extra 20% on top of the cost for VAT. With a local person this is a 50/50 toss up. They may or may charge VAT.
A Locksmith near me will try opening locks without damage
Most locksmiths who have been in the trade for 10+ years will get their work purely by their reputation and hearsay.
A real local person will not get out of their vehicle armed with a drill. They will try opening locks in many different ways. For example, picking, bypassing, decoding, fashioning keys and bumping locks.
They need to build a relationship with you as you are on their ‘patch’, they will definitely need you to recommend them to friends and family.
Locksmith near me never have to resort to destructive lock entry but it does unfortunately happen to all of us. Some locks are just not going to open without the correct key in the time we have to try.
We all prefer not to break things.
Thinking outside of the box is a necessity for every locksmith to keep costs down and reputation untarnished.
This article is written as a warning. If you do need a locksmith at 2am in the morning. Do not let 3:30am come around and you have just parted with £3,000 to get into your home. Maybe you will get something out of this article.
Most people keep the number for a breakdown service, an emergency plumber, an electrician and a locksmith. We would like to suggest you do the same. For the rainy days.
Independent locksmith – Incredible 5*
