I'm sorry to come crawling here as a noob without any technical expertise to speak of, but google isn't helping me much on this one.

I'm stuck in middle-of-nowhere, Ohio, with a failing distributor bearing in my 93 LX. The closest garage quoted me a price of about $600 (part/labor/tax) (and won't be able to do the repair until Tuesday), and I don't know enough about the problem to tell whether that's a reasonable price. They said it's not possible to get just a distributor bearing, so the entire distributor would have to be replaced. Any thoughts?

 

You can get a reman distributor at autozone for about 175$... new one for about 300$. So, if they were using new parts, that means they're charging you about 600$ an hour for labor... since this replacing a distributor takes about .... 15-20 minutes. If doing a crossword puzzle and eating lunch at the same time.

 

I agree. A distributor is a very simple job to do. $600 bucks seems very high - they're likely gouging you because

1) you're stuck and they know it
2) you may have admitted ignorance about cars to them

combine these 2 issues and any dishonest shop will smell the chance to make some extra money.