My experience in the US is that you can take a broken item to a reputable shop and the guy will spend a minute or two messing with it and then he'll give you an on-the-spot estimate of repairability and price.

In Finland, the standard line is that they'll take your gizmo and put it in the repair queue - and then just to have someone in the back room so much as breathe on it - it's gonna cost ya 50, 80, a hundred.