Промышленность США 138

What Happened to TV Repair Shops? | The Trade That Died in Every Town at Once There was a shop like it in every town. A counter with a stack of tickets on a spike, a back room with a bench and a tube caddy and three or four sets waiting with their backs off, and a man who could tell you within a minute of walking in whether the problem was worth fixing. He made house calls. He carried a case of tubes to your living room, pulled them one at a time, tested them in the caddy, found the dead one, and charged you for the tube and the trip. A television was a piece of furniture you owned for fifteen years, and he was the reason it lasted that long. At the peak there were tens of thousands of these shops in the United States. There is no meaningful number of them now. The story people tell is that the sets got too cheap to fix. That is true, but it is the end of the process and not the cause, and it explains nothing about why the trade died on roughly the same schedule everywhere — in Ohio and in Oregon, in towns of four hundred thousand and towns of four thousand, without any of these men knowing each other or comparing notes. What killed it was a series of decisions made by manufacturers, each of which was sensible, none of which was aimed at the repair shop at all. The tubes went first. Then the boards. Then the schematic that used to come taped inside the cabinet. Every step made the television better and cheaper, and every step removed one more thing a man with a bench could do about it. By the time the sets were disposable, there was nobody left to notice. There is a version of this happening again right now, to a trade that thinks it is safe.