This is why it usually costs so much. The guy that opened the shop realized that making only $10 to $20 an hour on labor only covers so much, and at the end of the day, he gets paid less than the mechanics since overhead has to come out of that. So he starts paying his mechanics by the job and charging the customer by the hour. IE the mechanic gets paid $5 for an oil change regardless of how long it too. But the customer gets charged for 30 minutes labor even though the mechanic only took 5 minutes with the car.
That leads to the mechanics adding in anything they can get away with if the owner isn't careful. If I changed the oil and 4 tires, that's two jobs that can get done in almost the exact same amount of time. If the customer will buy it, then great. I just made $40 for that 30 minutes of work, instead of $10. It's good for the mechanic on short jobs, and it's why longer jobs will get half-assed.
Still, you can find places that will do your oil for cheap and do it right. My wife found a place that would do it for $24, and not charge stupid extras. They also did it right. I checked. Cost of doing it myself was around $30. The motorcycle dealership, not so much. $70 for labor, plus parts, and the only parts they will use is their extremely high marked up yamaha stuff. I think I got quoted $90 for an oil change as a "first time customer with a military discount" and told that all my stuff they couldn't use. I laughed, rode down to cycle bought a strap and a low profile oil pan and rode home and did the change myself.
I stopped doing anything with a mechanic a few years ago when my brother told me what really goes on in a shop. I don't know how many times I got told that my old VW was an extra $30 just because it was a VW. "It's so much harder and you can't find the filters just anywhere." I found them at walmart, and it was the easiest oil change I ever did.
So I do it all myself. You can rent most of the one time tools from an auto parts store, for cheap. They might make you leave a deposit to cover replacement, but usually that deposit is they just hold onto your credit card info and don't bother checking the amount available. The other tools usually aren't that expensive, and even if they are, if you're using them more than once, they pay for themselves quite quickly. I saved over $200 rebuilding the front forks myself, and that's including buying all the tools I'd need.
