I used to roll my eyes at stuff like this, figured a late fee note just made you look greedy and scared off the good clients. Then a buddy talked me into trying it on a couple small jobs and it was like flipping a switch. People who were sitting on my invoice for three weeks suddenly paid in a week, and not one of them ever got hit with the fee either. I still don't fully get why it works, maybe it just puts you higher on the pile of bills they actually care about. So yeah, I was wrong about it, and your Denver story tracks with what I've seen.

That fish microwave guy is a war crime and I'm glad my building doesn't have one. But yeah, Raj is real and he fixed a dead charging port on my old ThinkPad for the price of a burrito I bought him from the taco truck down the street. The catch is you have to catch him on a Tuesday or Thursday because the other days he's at his actual job doing something with servers I still don't understand. The taxes for beer thing is not as crazy as it sounds because there's a retired CPA who comes in on Fridays and I'm pretty sure he'd do my 1040 for a six pack of something hoppy. You're right though, I spent three months avoiding the place to save $200 and ended up paying $150 just to get my screen replaced at a chain store. Being cheap is expensive, that's the whole lesson here.