MODERN LIVING: Out of Order

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The whole experience was so frustrating, so painful that even today Robert Lindsey, 46, cannot talk about his trouble calmly. “Five months ago,” says Lindsey, who works as a short-order cook on Los Angeles’ industrial East Side, “I called a repairman to fix my 21-in. TV set.” The repairman took one look and said the tuner was broken, a minor matter of $20 or $25. He produced a blank “authorization” for repairs for Lindsey to sign. “So I signed it.”

For the next two months, TV Fan Lindsey struggled vainly to get his set back. No sooner was the tuner reported cured than the repairman said he needed a new picture tube—$60 more. That took another four weeks. Eventually the set came back—only to break down soon after. “The tuner again?” groaned Lindsey. “Yup,” said the repairman, and bundled it off for another month. The final bill, including “delivery”: $162.40. Says Lindsey, with the dazed air of a man who had unwittingly picked up a live wire: “They really gimme the works. And the worst of it is my set don’t work no better than when this here run-around began.”

Mr. Fixit. “This here runaround” is a phrase instantly recognizable to hundreds of thousands of frustrated U.S. householders—and so is the “they.” “They,” in the moment of supreme exasperation that coincides with the collapse of an electric dryer on washday, is the apparently easy going, unhurried individual who is striving manfully to maintain the plumbing in the nation’s 28 million homes, the wrench-wielding mechanic who administers to the health of the nation’s 50 million autos, its 15 million power lawnmowers, its 375 million electric appliances. “They” is the U.S. Repairman in all his disguises—the familiar Mr. Fixit of fact and financial friction, the man everyone knows—assiduously courted, ardently denounced, universally accepted as the indispensable man of the gadget-ridden American home.

The U.S. repairman has long since won a special niche in American folklore. Depending on the circumstances, he ranks midway between the riverboat cardsharp and the village idiot, part freebooting buccaneer and part plain boob; or he appears, armed with screwdriver and flashlight, as a latter-day St. George riding heroically against the dragons that infest the nation’s drain traps and fuse boxes. In commuter cars, at cocktail parties and women’s clubs, he is the center of a game of “Can you top this?”—an endless recital of domestic triumphs and defeats. The plumber who forgets his tools is legendary; now, says one pained Washington housewife with murder on her mind, “he just rides around in that white Thunderbird and never even comes.” The counterplay comes from the housewife who has discovered a reliable Mr. Fixit, a possession as chic today as the little dressmaker who could copy the latest Paris fashions. Whether villain or hero, the repairman is indispensable; he dominates a vast area of dripping faucets, faulty percolators and a host of unanswered telephone calls for help—and all because the moneyed U.S. public has made him so.

Nightmare in the Kitchen. The typical U.S. housewife who once considered herself lucky if she had a washing machine is now surrounded by 25 or more labor-saving electric yeomen worth $3,000. Her do-it-yourself husband—in futile revolt against the professionals—has hundreds , more invested in power saws, drills and lathes—all of which need maintenance and repair. Some 87% of all U.S. homes have washing machines; there are TV sets in 81%, refrigerators in 96%, vacuum cleaners in 67%. No one can do without any of the marvelous new gadgets—therefore no one can do without the repairman to keep them going.

In the housewife’s new electronic thralldom, her recurring nightmare is of a darkened kitchen full of sullenly nonfunctioning appliances.

¶ In Montclair, NJ. a party-giving woman phoned hysterically for her repairman; just as the first cocktail guests arrived, the handle came off the refrigerator, locking canapes and ice cubes inside. ¶ In Bloomfield, NJ. a housewife shrieked over the phone that “the washing machine is chasing me all around the room.” “Whadya expect,” snarled the repairman, “when you put a lopsided load in something that turns up 450 revolutions per minute.” ¶ In Akron a distraught wife cried angrily: “My dryer is on fire. What are you going to do about it?” “Let it burn,” snapped the repairman. ¶ In San Francisco a young couple pleaded with the repairman to show them how to operate their new $275 electric ironer. Said he blandly: “It won’t take you more than six months to learn.” ¶ In Denver a matron sadly told the doctor that her husband had had a “spell,” brought on by a balky power lawnmower; he had finally assaulted it with a sledge hammer.

“Where Are My Tools?” Once, a reasonably handy householder could keep his own radio working, his auto purring smoothly. But no more. As modern technology leaps forward to answer the demand for ever bigger and better gadgets, the TV set has developed innards as complicated as an electronic brain, and the auto engine has 1,000 parts. In New Orleans recently, an elderly gentleman of model-T vintage looked into the trunk of his brand-new power-brake, power-steered, power-windowed 1957 Chrysler and demanded: “Where are my tools?” “And what,” came the reply, “would you do with them?”

What can anyone do but deliver himself squarely into the hands of the repairman, whose burgeoning ranks are the measure of his importance? From less than 1,000,000 in 1940, the ranks have nearly doubled to 1,800,000, spread through hundreds of big company service departments and uncounted thousands of small repair shops. All told, the repairman is the proprietor of a business grossing $16.6 billion annually, more than the total retail sales of clothing or home furnishings. TV repairs last year alone cost nearly $2 billion, more than the value of all new TV sales; electrical appliances added another $1.6 billion to the repair bill, auto repairs $6.6 billion, home repairs $7 billion. This year the totals will climb another 6%.

The bill keeps rising—and trouble comes in—because modern technology has apparently surpassed the U.S. repairman as well as his customers. Repairer and repairee glare at each other over a barricade of stubbornly nonfunctioning appliances, across a battlefield strewn with canceled checks and blackened TV tubes. Emblazoned over the unhappy scene is a legend to express their sorry relations: “Out of Order.” Says a Salt Lake City housewife, expressing a sentiment universal to the times: “I just have to find someone I can trust, but I’m too dumb to know if I’ve ever found that someone. I have a feeling I’m being cheated all the time.”

Chinese Water Torture. The complaints are not of wreckage on a grand scale. The trouble is more like a Chinese water torture: a steady drip, drip, drip of $10 here, $25 there, $50 somewhere else in a vain but never-ending attempt to get all the myriad gadgets of the modern household working at the same time. The problem affects everyone: to the U.S. repairman, all householders are created unequal to their possessions, and neither fame nor fortune can speed him on the snail-like course of his appointed rounds.

One spectacular example is the case of Hollywood Actor Dana Andrews. As guardian of a twelve-room, $95,000 stucco house, in which he lives with his wife and three children in Burbank, Calif., he has played a dozen years of unrelieved tragedy opposite the U.S. repairman. His first mistake, says Andrews, was buying the house; his second was spending $1,200 to have it painted. Within two months the paint started to peel since the painter had failed to sandblast the old paint off the stucco, and had put oil paint on top of a water wash. “So I called my painter,” says Andrews, “but he wasn’t interested in my paint job any more; he’d taken up ballet dancing.”

That was only a taste of what was to come. The washing machine overflowed and rotted out the laundry floor. No sooner had Andrews put in a new floor and a new washer than “the same thing happened all over again.” Next to go was his $500 power lawnmower. “Eight months ago it broke down, and I’m still trying to find someone to fix it.” One piano tuner used vodka on the piano keys. “They curled up like Oriental shoes.” A furniture repairman smeared polish remover over all the furniture, got drunk, collected $100 and left. “He ruined the finish on five tables.” Then came the ultimate catastrophe. One night, in the midst of a dinner party, a Niagara of water cascaded down the chandelier into the dining room. The new roof leaked. “Three times,” says Andrews, “I’ve had the roof repaired. But no one can find the leak.”

As of last week. Homeowner Dana Andrews had shelled out something like $15,000 merely for emergency repairs.

Licenses for All? On a lesser scale, Actor Andrews’ purse-draining troubles can be matched by homeowners from coast to coast. To some, the annoyances are so steadily infuriating that they simply junk a broken appliance and buy a new one. “I’ve gotten to the point where I’m terrified to call the TV serviceman,” says one Washington homeowner. “I’d rather kick the set down the cellar steps than pay a bill for $70.” Yet most Americans still phone the repairman and wait, with rising apprehension, for his return with the bill. Complained a New Orleans TV man, accused of dropping a repaired set he was about to deliver: “Sure I dropped it—that woman tried to stab me with a pair of scissors.”

Adding to the flood of public complaints is the swarm of petty crooks and chiselers nibbling hungrily at the edges of the lucrative repairman’s market. Better Business Bureaus in cities from coast to coast answer thousands of complaints annually from customers who have been fleeced by crooked repairmen. For every case in the files, a dozen others go un-reported—or unrecognized. To date, the efforts by police bunko squads and civic associations to clean up the repair industry have resulted in licensing laws for various types of servicemen in several states. But Leland S. McCarthy, chief of Washington’s Better Business Bureau, thinks this is no solution since a license lulls the householder and is no guarantee of honesty. Says he: “Licensing repairmen is like giving them a license to operate fraudulently.”

The Chimney Swifts. As every TV owner knows, the chiselers’ happiest hunting grounds are still in the booming TV industry. No householder was particularly surprised recently when Stanley Seltzer, 27, an enterprising Bronx, N.Y. repairman, was caught changing the serial numbers on defective picture tubes to make them appear new; the shocking thing was that when the Bronx district attorney searched deeper into the case he uncovered a racket involving 45 individuals and 32 companies, all supposedly honest dealers and repairmen, who had fobbed off defective tubes on well over 600,000 customers before the law put a stop to it. Even that is small potatoes compared to the take of “cut-rate” TV repairmen whose siren lure is only $2 (or sometimes $1) for a service call. The hooker is that they wind up charging huge prices for the actual repairs. Better Business Bureaus warn that, with few exceptions, any repairman who charges less than a $4-to-$7 base fee for a house call is suspect; his time en route usually comes to at least that much. By disconnecting a few wires in several brand-new sets, the St. Louis Better Business Bureau trapped seven dishonest repairmen in its area, found that they charged between $21.92 and $42.50 for work that should have cost less than $10 ($7 service fee plus $3 for parts). In Detroit 20 out of 22 servicemen spot-checked were dishonest; in San Francisco six out of eight. Nor is it pennyante swindling. One Washington repairman grew so prosperous that he had 14 trucks on the road before he was forced to sell out.

Every U.S. city also has 1) “chimney swifts,” who bilk householders out of an estimated $500 million annually by promising low-cost roofing or chimney repairs, then disappear without either completing the job or paying local supply houses for their materials, and 2) auto mechanics who persuade motorists to contract for a $139 rebuilt engine, wind up charging $400 or more. Says a Detroit Better Businessman: “These chiselers stay in business because people are just not smart enough to look at what they sign.”

And many are the householders who have been swindled by the “furnace cleaners” who arrive with the first snow to perform a $35 cleaning job. Instead, as happened in Milwaukee, they may smash the furnace with a sledge hammer, then persuade their victims that the furnace is not worth repairing, talk them into a new $1,200 heating plant. One variation popular in San Francisco: the uniformed man who poses as a furnace “inspector,” and tells the housewife: “I know of one child who turned blue because of escaping fumes from a furnace like this one. Lady, if you love those kids, turn that furnace off and get a new one!”

The New Recruits. Actually, the great majority of repairmen are honest enough. The difficulty is that no one can tell the good from the bad—so many are merely incompetent. (One do-it-yourself householder, who had managed to fix his dishwasher while waiting for the repairman, let him check it when he came. The repairman managed to break it again.) And the shortage is so great that almost any repairman is a foul-weather friend. The experienced oldtimers who once formed the backbone of the business have been swamped by the flood of complicated gadgets. To their assistance have come such recruits as the Chicago barber, who “repairs” TV sets at night, and the New Orleans roofer who suddenly developed acrophobia and became a refrigerator repairman. Other new recruits, relying on a smattering of wartime technical experience, rate themselves capable of handling the most complicated peacetime machines.

Many of the brightest postwar candidates who enrolled in trade or company-run schools to learn to repair TV sets, autos, appliances, etc.. soon quit for better-paying jobs in industry. An apprentice TV or auto repairman gets only $1.25 an hour, often has to work six days a week, while inexperienced production-line workers get up to $2—and do not have to face irate customers while they learn. The Automobile Manufacturers Association estimates that U.S. garages are short at least 40,000 good mechanics, and that about 40,000 new ones will have to be trained each year just to take care of retirements and keep up with the outpouring of new cars. Bedeviled by the lure of the white-collar job, trade and vocational schools have fallen far short of keeping up with the demand because 1) teenagers can also earn high salaries in industry without a trade, and 2) the schools need such a sizable investment in mechanical equipment that they cannot expand fast enough.

Ploy & Counter-Ploy. As part of their training course, many firms have manuals to teach apprentices the basic ground rules of repairing and repairmanship. Some repairmanship ploys compiled by Chicago’s Central Television Service, Inc. for a manual put out by Parks Publishing Co.:

Q. (by householder): My set seems to require more service than my neighbor’s. Did I buy a lemon?

A.: Madam, we have never yet found a television set we could not repair and put in perfect working condition. Note: When answering questions, be sincere and convincing, but be very careful not to overdo it. It may make the customer suspicious.

Q.: Five men have been here. Why couldn’t the first man fix it?

A.: Do not knock other servicemen. Answer as follows: You must realize, madam, that a television receiver is a very complicated mechanism.

Special Situation: You call at the house and find the customer in her negligee.

Solution: Under these circumstances, do not enter the house. This momentary embarrassment may save you a lot of trouble.

To this practiced repairmanship, the homeowner has developed his own countergambits. The wise antirepairman knows, for example, that he must never, never deal with underlings; he must always go straight to the top—write the company president. One St. Louis man gets super service by calling the repair-shop owner, threatening to come down and “punch the first person I see in the nose.” Others try the food gambit, laying on sandwiches, beer or liquor for the repairman. And when all else fails, a wife can call the repairman’s wife. Says one Milwaukeean: “I asked her how she’d like to keep house without any kitchen water: Did she have some influence on her husband? Did she? Boy, he was out the next day and fixed things fast.”

Prices & Revenues. Beset on all sides, the indispensable man everyone would like to dispense with naturally takes a somewhat sour view of his own profession. “This is a stinking business,” says Mike Venanzio. proprietor of a small repair shop in Ambridge, Pa. “Every drugstore and five & ten, I don’t care where, can sell radios and TVs at cut-rate prices. They don’t have to worry about service. If something breaks down, they don’t fix it. The people come to me. If I charge a decent price because I can do a good job, they get sore.”

Repairmen also complain that U.S. industry’s soaring production schedules are the bane of their business. “Never in the history of the appliance industry have we had a time when so much faulty merchandise was being received,” says Al Bernsohn, vice president of the 5,000-member National Appliance and Radio-TV Dealers Association. In a recent sampling, 70% of the members polled reported an increase in broken appliances from the factory. Railroad-salvage salesmen bucked them on to cut-rate retailers, and the discounters in turn passed them on to the public, leaving the independent repairman to handle any troubles.

Actually, as shown by a 1956 survey by the National Appliance and Radio-TV Dealers Association, the average U.S. appliance dealer probably loses money on his service operation; gross profits (not including extra rent, power, clerical help, etc.) amounted to only .6% of service revenue despite all the public griping about exorbitant repair prices. Independent repair shops do better—they must to stay in business—yet even their profits are so slim that more repair shops fail than any other kind of private commercial (laundries, undertakers, etc.) service.

But the repairman’s biggest, loudest beef of all is directed squarely at his meal ticket—the appliance-owning U.S. public. “The public has more chiselers and stupid jerks in it than any place else,” says an angry Pittsburgh appliance dealer. “Everyone wants a bargain, but when the cut-rate, $100 TV set goes fizzle and the repairman’s bill comes to $25, the customer refuses to pay.” Manufacturers are partly to blame; while the auto owner has learned by long experience to expect occasional repairs, few appliancemakers emphasize the question of service. Even so, say repairmen, the public usually brings much of the trouble on itself. Some 30% of all service calls are “nuisance” calls, such as explaining the operation of appliances to people who never bother to read the instructions, and argue, as did one Washington matron: “Why should I? I know how to run these things without reading about them.” In New Orleans a housewife phoned angrily that her new freezer was defrosting; the repairman found it was unplugged. In Maple Shade, NJ. an infuriated motorist called the service station to tow his stalled car away; the mechanic found that the owner had forgotten to push the “drive” button on his new pushbutton transmission. And in Chicago repairmen for General Electric have been trying for years to convince a lady that her refrigerator does not leak—the trouble is her dog.

Failure at the Top. In the middle, between repairman and customer, are the manufacturers and big utilities, whose sales and reputations suffer with each new breakdown or complaint. Repairs is one of their major problems, and they are the ones who are working hardest to solve it. Says Judson Sayre, president of the Norge Division of Borg-Warner Corp., waving a letter from a Cleveland housewife: “Look at this stack of repair bills she enclosed. I don’t blame that woman one bit. She’s unhappy. I’d be unhappy too. It’s a failure in leadership, not the fault of underlings. The guy who licks the service problem is going to wind up on top in this industry.” Yet Sayre has no illusions about the size of the task. When a family friend was recently charged $46.50 just to install a new washer, he angrily advised her not to pay, said he would pay the costs of any lawsuit.

For the company that does succeed in providing prompt and efficient service, the rewards are well worth the effort. Starting in 1903, Detroit Edison Co. began giving customers free light bulbs, largely as a publicity stunt, soon went on to free electric cords and fuses. Last year the company sent 275 repairmen on 160,000 fuse calls, 138,000 stove-service assignments, 456,000 other appliance missions, charging nothing for labor and only for parts totaling more than $1. The company knows that nothing cuts electricity sales faster than a dead light bulb, a dead dishwasher, a dead freezer. And though the service cost Detroit Edison some $7,000,000 last year, it paid untold dividends in bigger sales—to say nothing of customer relations.

The U.S. appliance industry can also learn some other important lessons from Detroit Edison. The company’s repair experience has turned up frequent evidence of poorly made, badly designed appliances. Plastic knobs, handles and moldings often break almost as soon as the appliance is unpacked. Many appliances are unnecessarily hard to service. The company found one hand iron that took 40 minutes to take apart. Some modern toasters are riveted clear around, require $2.50 worth of labor before the serviceman can even get to the works, much less repair them. Many so-called “built-in” ranges and washer-dryer combinations are nothing more than standard, movable appliances with the casters removed, made to be serviced from the rear. When built in, they cannot be serviced without tearing them out from the wall. Says Detroit Edison’s Service Boss William R. Milby: More companies should “create a design with service in mind. That means a certain amount of interchangeability. We think a manufacturer should try to make his ’58 models at least somewhat the same as his ’57 models—that is, they should use only six kinds of bolts instead of 18.”

As gadgets become increasingly complex—and the repair bills mount—every businessman is attacking the problem at all levels, from the small local repair shop up to the factory production line. Philco, Motorola and other manufacturers have found that it is often better to scrap the inevitable lemons that crop up in every model than try to repair them. Sears, Roebuck recently exchanged a Dallas customer’s TV set five times before both company and customer were satisfied. To eliminate a troublesome production error, Norge spent thousands of dollars changing the transmissions in 27,000 washing machines. Major companies have training schools to help servicemen repair their products, maintain parts depots around the country so repairmen will not hold up a job for want of a special kind of a nut.

To beat the repair problem, big companies are taking on more and more of their own repairs. To make sure that its appliances are well-serviced, G.E. has set up 14 company service centers in major cities; Radio Corp. of America, one of the earliest pioneers of factory service, goes even farther, has a battalion of 2,000 servicemen in its 160 U.S. branches, estimates that they make 40,000 calls weekly and service some 10% of all RCA television sets in U.S. homes. Relieved of the expensive burden of service, the franchised dealer can use his capital to buy in bigger lots at lower prices, and win back some of the competitive edge he has long given away to discount houses.

No. I: Service. Eventually, big companies may control all their own repairs. Westinghouse Electric Corp., the nation’s third-biggest appliancemaker, is already working in that direction. Two years ago the company polled 10,000 U.S. housewives to find out what was important to them. The No. 1 item: service—63% of those who were satisfied with service said they would buy the same brand again; only 39% who were dissatisfied were willing to try again. Today product service is a separate division at Westinghouse, with responsibility for every appliance from hand irons to refrigerators. It not only oversees repairs, but also tries to keep breakdowns from happening. Service-division experts sit in on all design meetings, have total control over production-line quality, can even shut down an entire line if the appliance starts giving customers trouble.

No less than appliance men, Detroit’s automakers are fully aware of the repair problem. A Ford Motor Co. poll showed that 94% of all car buyers will return to the same dealer if they get good service, only 21% if service is bad. When Ford set up its new Edsel division, it realized that it would be hard to sell cars without expert service. Ford set up a complete garage where $1,000,000 worth of prototype cars were torn down and rebuilt to lick all servicing problems before the first Edsel was sold. Says Edsel Service Manager Harold N. Johnson: “We think we’ve shown dealers how to get 30% gross profit on servicing operations—without resorting to corruption.”

Design for the Future. The future promises an ever-increasing stream of bigger, brainier gadgets—all of which will present a tougher repair problem for the U.S. serviceman unless they are designed to be fixed easily. The progress is slow, but there are clear signs of advance. Westinghouse’s new washer-dryers have a hinged panel on the front so the repairman can get at the motor in a jiffy; before, it took two men just to pull the appliance away from the wall. Motorola, G.E., Admiral, RCA, Zenith are redesigning their radios and TV sets, using more transistors in place of tubes, so that they will be more rugged, last much longer.

The Black Boxes. Nor are U.S. businessmen content to stop there. Just as today’s military radar sets, bombing systems, and automatic pilots are so fantastically complex that they must be removed and sent back to the factory for maintenance, so tomorrow’s new radar ranges, electronic dishwashers and color TV consoles will have plug-in motors and control units that only factory experts will repair with special tools and special knowledge. The major labor the U.S. repairman will be called upon to perform—at his $5-an-hour fee—will be to take out a nonfunctioning unit, plug in a substitute and ship the original back to the plant. And then some day U.S. industry will achieve its ultimate goal: the humming electronic gadgets in every U.S. household will be virtually foolproof. By the time the machine finally wears out, the U.S. homeowner will have got his money’s worth, and be ready to buy a new one. The perfect, unbreakable machine is many long years away. But in that dazzling, much-to-be-desired future, no one will have to wonder why the repairman cannot repair. He won’t have to.