67. Tow Trucks
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Let's say you're running a few errands downtown on a friday afternoon. You circle around looking for a parking spot and you finally see one that kind of looks like the curve is red, but you decide to take the risk. A few hours later, you come back and your car is gone.

Your stomach drops, your heart races, your hands start to get climb. I forget what I actually part. Did someone steal my car? Shall I call the cops? But somewhere across town, the guy who's in possession of your vehicle doesn't have much sympathy for your point.

A lot of the pain is brought on the owner by themselves. People get really upset, but it's like, you know, if you didn't park where you weren't supposed to, you wouldn't .

have got your car, told bill Georgeous. Is the residents of mix record service based in second on michigan. It's one of more than thirty five thousand towing companies in the us. They make up a twelve billion dollar a year industry.

We covered the entire gamut of calling. We told people who break down with a passenger car or a personal vehicle, and then we also do impound toes, are just gonna drunk driving or stolen vehicles, or where somebody parks where they are not supposed to.

Whether you get stuck on a desolate road at to a clock in the morning or a park in a red zone, a tower will be there to whisk your vehicle away. And when they send you the bill, they don't expect you to thank them.

We go from hero or zero, about thirty seconds .

for the economics radio in network. This is the economics of everyday. Thinks that cricket today to trucks. Bill Georgeous ever planned on going into the towing business when he graduated from college in the eighties. His dream was to be a doctor.

My next step was going to be medical school. That's what my father wanted for me.

But when his dad got sick, Georgeous had to help out with the family business.

I didn't kind of like the full range of things at the business, from scrub in the toilets all the way to Operating our biggest trucks. Thirty eight years later, I am still here today.

He's the second generation owner of mix record service. The company has three locations across central mhic. An and its was known as a journalist tower. They take on all kinds of work.

There are many different types of towing and jobs are often classified by the weight of the vehicle that's being told there's slight duty, which are your typical pasture cars. There's medium duty for things like R, V, S. And homes and there's heavy duty for the really big stuff.

We have a large group of commercial accounts, ambuLances, school buses, garbage trucks and cement trucks, tractor trailers, delivery vehicles like fedex and amazon and ups to .

take care of all these jobs. Mix record service has a big fleet of expensive vehicles, the standard light duty to truck that shows up to toe your car usually runs around one hundred thousand dollars. The bigger trucks are many times more.

A forty to fifty one record is somewhere between seven hundred and nine hundred thousand dollars. If I buy a large rotator like a seventy five, ten or a hundred one truck, i'm talking one and half to one point eight million dollars for one two truck. Now I show up with two other flat beds that are one hundred and seventy thousand dollars a piece, a sky with folks at ninety thousand and a fork lift at sixty thousand. I have almost two and a half million dollars of equipment on that scene, and I have to have IT available twenty four hours a day.

These machines are also costly to ensure, usually summer between two thousand and five thousand dollars a year per truck, and a towing company has to pay drivers who typically work on commission and get twenty to thirty percent of each job. Operators like Georgeous have to account for this overhead when pricing their services for a typical breakdown involving a standard car. Georgeous charges seventy eight bucks for the hook up in the first five miles, and then five dollars for each additional mile. For more complicated stuff, they might charge higher hours rates.

Well, probably the largest that i've ever built was over fifty thousand dollars. And that was the tanker that IT rolled over that was loaded with an ask that I was very, very costive. When IT .

comes to earning money, there's one job that most towing companies don't enjoy taking on working with roadside service providers like triple a or echo drivers pay an annual fee for road side coverage. If they have a breakdown, they call the insurance company, which passes on the request to a toy contractor like mix record service. And when Georgeous gets that call, he knows he will be paid way less than his usual rate.

They look at the lowest common nominator and that Price they're looking for the cheap her's provider to get that service.

As a result, he ends up prioritizing other jobs before he rescues the triple a customer who's waiting on the shoulder of the highway.

If I have a road service told that pays thirty five or forty dollars and you call in and you're onna pay me seventy eight dollars, who's going first? I'm token the cash customer and hear this road service customer is waiting and their waiting and they are waiting and their waiting.

For most two truck drivers, triple a calls are nuisance, but the rest of the job full of surprises.

One of the most recent interesting jobs we did was a gentleman passed out behind the wheel and wound up with his car in a river is a little old like saturn ford n max.

Korei is the COO war of H. M. Roadside, a small towing company in pencil, a florida.

The water was sweet t color. You could stick your hand of the water not see at two inches away. So the first thing we did took a magnet with a rope and started magnet fishing for the car, trying to figure out how deep IT was.

Once we figured that was roughly twenty full deep, I contacted our local volunteer search rescue Operation, asked about, seems they had some divers that could help us. They tie rope to the car, then they go down there with our rigging. IT took us about four and a half hours from time. We all got there to have his car back on dry land.

Even the straight forward jobs involve a fair bit of geometry.

If you can't understand angles, you're never going to be as a to driver. You have to know if you put this here in this, Polly here, what way this car is gonna go to make you do what you want and not damage something.

One of the biggest everyday chAllenges in toeing is hooking up a car without scratching its pain tour, ripping off its bumper. Creamy says cars used to come with standard sats in the frame that tow truck drivers could hold into, but many manufacturer have done away with them, and Operators now have to get creative in .

recent years of newer cars. IT seems like manufacturer have forgotten their cars, have to be told these new war cars have little island hooks that screw into the front bumper. And tota drivers hate them. I refused to use them because they're held on to the bumper. Any resistance that whole thing is coming off to.

Operators now often have to get under the car and hook up a big v shaped strap to the suspension, and performing a job like that on the side of a busy road or highway can also be dangerous. Bill Georgeous knows this first hand. Unfortunately.

we had one of our drivers killed by a drunk driver, and it's not uncommon for tours to get killed on the highway. And it's basically what we call the d drivers, the dumb, the drug that distracted the drawing people that will come through that accident scene, and they're going by us at eighty and ninety miles an hour with their phone in their hand.

Crime has had his own close calls.

I've been lucky to escape serious injury. I've been hit twice of cotten mayors of cars, twice that accident scenes. Luckily, the worst i've had is just some really bad bruising.

I was able to see the cars coming and get most of the way out of the way. We had a total her driver here with another company that almost lost his life and was forced to retire out of the industry. And I was a hit and run. He woke up underneath his truck with an eyeball hanging out of his head, and both of his legs broken.

Helping stranded customers is so risky. Y that tours often call these kinds of jobs hero toes, but there's another side of the business. One that casts tours is the villain.

I've been called every name in the book. I've been called a crook, a con artist. I've had somebody tried to hit me with their car after they picked IT up from .

in pound that's coming up. All the towing jobs you've heard about so far, or called consensual toes, those are situations like breakdowns or accidents. Were you the driver or the one requesting the service? But there are also non consensual toes, the jobs you don't ask for in those cases, the two truck drivers customer isn't you. It's a police officer or a property owner who wants your vehicle removed.

That's going to be when somebody is arrested, drunk driving, driving while suspended, no insurance in proper plates or they park in a no parking zone and they're blocking the use of someone's driveway, or they are blocking the use of business Operators .

like bill Georgeous of mix record service get these jobs by forming relationships with police departments and local businesses.

Sometimes they call for one truck, sometimes they call for ten, all at the same time. So you know, you have to be able to mobilize that equipment and that mam power twenty four hours a day with an unpredictable need. In large places like an arbor, michigan during A U of m football game, one hundred and ten thousand people come into the big house.

And there's a huge amount of what we call a private trust pay toes that happened at that point in time. And you know is that fair to park at the seven eleven of the convenience store and blocked the company's ability to do business so you can go to the football game or no? What's not .

nonconsensual toes come with higher fees. All Georgeous charges around eighty dollars to hook up a breakdown. His rates can go up to one hundred and forty seven dollars for simple compounds, not including additional knowledge charges.

In some cities like sanford, cisco in impound tou can run upwards of five hundred dollars, thanks to additional administrative fees charged by the city. And that doesn't include the cost of storage. When your car is told non consensually, it's taken to an impound lot where it's stored until you to claim IT. Sometimes these lots are owned by a city or a third party, but many toys like Georgeous owe their own lights and charged daily rate for storage, typically around thirty to forty dollars per day.

You have to have a piece of properly fans, properly zoned lighted staff, surveyed property in order to conduct that business. As soon as I attached to a vehicle, I have a duty and responsibility to return that car to the owner in the same condition that we received IT. So we have to protect and preserve that car. So as soon as I hook onto IT, i'm ensuring that vehicle until the owner picks that vehicle up.

Most states require toe companies to notify a driver when a car is told. Often that notification comes by mail, and if the car isn't picked up from the impounded lots within a certain period after that notification is sent out, usually around thirty days or so, the towing company has the right to file, your car is abandoned, Georgeous says. This is fairly common.

We see a lot of what's called the title jump, where people buy the car and never transfer into their name in order to get the car and drive IT off the lot IT has have plates and insurance. If somebody buys a five hundred dollar hot just to go back and for the worker school with, and they drive IT around until he gets impounded, that car the'd lose IT just let you go is cheaper than the custom insurance for one year.

If the owner doesn't pick up their car, the toe company doesn't get paid, which means IT has to sell the car at action to recoup its costs. In many states like michigan, any proceeds beyond the total towing and storage charges have to be sent to the state, and the owner has a right to claim them, but those proceeds often don't cover the towing companies bills, and Operators have to take a loss.

We're going to clean up an accident scene, remove all the debris, take at all. And we're never onna get paid other than a couple hundred dollars of scrap money after we hold the car until IT can be legally processed .

for us to dispose of IT Operators like bill Georgeous take pride in doing things by the book. But the same cannot be said for all tos. The industry has a reputation for unscrupulous having or a lot of .

the things that towing companies due are not reasonable, even if the person deserve to be told in the first place .

to resuming is the director of the consumer watchdog program at U. S. Public interest research group. She's researched a variety of shady business practices, from film, msy, airlink, refund policies to robot. In a recent report, SHE honed in on the world of towing, and SHE didn't like what he found.

I mean, we believe absolutely that if you park in properly on private property or in a public space, then it's reasonable that there could be consequences, but those consequences should be fair. And as we looked into the issue, I was just shocked at how agreeable some of the behavior is out there in some of the states.

Murray focused on a side of the industry called predatory towing.

IT basically involves either taking advantage of someone who deserves to be told, or in some cases, illegally towing someone when they didn't deserve to be told. Predatory towing seems to target, particularly college campuses, communities of color, senior citizens, a lot of times, lower income apartment complexes.

just to people who .

are basically leased equip to be able to deal with IT.

Predatory towing can take a lot of forms, sometimes its policies that make IT harder for you to pick up your car.

A predatory towing company might tell your vehicle an hour away. I don't accept credit card or debit cards, cash only. In some cases, some of the storage places are not open after five P M, or not open on weekends.

In other cases, you could be just towing people for frivolous reasons.

In some states, it's just like the wild west, and people were getting told because the towing company thought maybe they had just a few pounds, too little of air pressure in their tires or maybe they weren't perfectly centered in the yellow lines of the parking space that they had paid for and were allowed to be in. Maybe they didn't have all four screws on their .

license plate. This industry, because you can legally take some of these car and force them to pay you, attracts a lot of less than Stellar individuals because they see IT is free money.

Max rei of asian m roadside in pencil, a florida, says that one predatory tactic he sees a lot is something called patroling. Trucks will hide around the corner of certain hot spots waiting to pounce on unsuspecting Parkers.

There's a lot of businesses where they literally have somebody just walking around the parking lot all day. And if you're off the property for thirty seconds, you've got a tow truck, they're taking your car. One that I got asked to do was an apartment complex that has one hundred eighty two apartments and sixty five parking spaces.

And if you and buy a parking space, you can park there. So if you imagine with them having three times the units, there is constantly people parking in those parking spaces. And we would drive through at night and find any car that didn't have a parking pass on IT and tell IT, which obviously he said a lot of people.

And then I started talking to some of the residents, and these are all college kids that had just moved here, didn't know anything about our town and were misled about there are being available parking and now attract in at least, and somewhere they don't know with nowhere to park. I didn't feel like if that was morally right. So I pulled my contract .

from that complex. In many states, if you catch a to truck in the active towing your car, the Operator has a legal obligation to unhook IT and is only allowed to charge you a drop fee that usually ends up being roughly half of what the toe would have otherwise cost. But some Operators use special to tracks that are designed to toe a car in a matter of seconds.

The self water trucks, you don't even have to get out of the cab of the truck to hook the car up. You have controls in the cab that lower your boobs and push IT in and out and close the whale rids around the wheels. Once i'm off that property, I can charge you full Price. So what a lot of the predatory guys do is just pull IT out in to the street, then finish tying down .

to research says that some to truck Operators even strike kickback deals with restaurants or apartment complex.

So say, you own an apartment complex and I own a to truck company. IT may be that i'm allowed to control that parking lot. And for every car that I know, but I give you two box of IT that's not cool.

Deals like that incentivize businesses to toe more cars, even in cases where the infraction is questionable. In her report, murray found that two thirds of states have no laws banning kickbacks for private towing companies, around half don't have any caps on what companies can charge for towing and storage, and forty percent don't require science on private property, warning that cars parked there might be told.

The bottom line is states that don't have enough consumer protections. And where the towing companies don't feel like anybody's watching over their shoulder, the towing companies are pretty much free to do whatever they want.

In recent years, a handful of states have taken steps to clamp down on predatory towing in michigan. Legislators are currently proposing changes to the state vehicle code. The revisions would, among other things, require tours to take photographs of an infraction before towing a car on private property. Bill Georgeous understands the need to eliminate bad actors.

There are some abuses in our industry, we know that. And so there is going to be some changes coming. And we're working with the legislature in the state to make IT more appropriate for the tower brother, appropriate for the consumer.

My father wanted something Better for me. He said to me, son, I don't want you to waste your life in this business. And I said, you know, if I am a doctor or am a toe guy, i'm gonna people every day. That's how you to stay the hero more than the zero.

For the economics of everyday things i'm extracted. This episode was produced by me and series and mixed by jermy Johnson. We had help from Daniel Morrison.

You can almost pick a vehicle. And I can tell you what the most common problem is of what we run in to, like bmw, is you couldn't pay me the only one with amount of electrical issues they have.

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