I can only agree; went in to the dealership twice for two different cars. One was for a buick owned by my dad, it had transponder keys. At the dealership they wanted 90 dollars for the key blank and 40 dollars to 'program it'.

Solution: Went to a roaming locksmith who sort of screwed me on the wait so he went down to 35 per key I wanted versus charging me $50 dollars that he originally wanted. I got 2 keys made for $70 dollars. He didn't charge me for programming since all it was was putting the key in this machine that beeped after a second. He then tried the keys and since they worked; we each went our separate ways.

My brother had a pontiac grand am gt and the shifter cable had lost its nut and washer. The hardware was pretty hard to jury rig since any nut and washer he tried to get in there would fall out after a while; so he decided he might buy the nut and washer until he heard the price. It would have cost 400 dollars to order the parts; they wouldn't just order the nut and washer that were needed. We left and he sold the car; pretty much the mechanic who bought it went to a junkyard and bought the pieces for like less than 10 bucks; most of that is because junkyards here have to charge for an environmental fee or some such; this could of course be some scam but whatever. This is sort of a weak case but trying to force him to buy 400 dollars worth of parts in order to get a special nut and washer just seemed dumb.