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Originally Posted by Geoff Bourquin
It's sad to see so many shops going away.
I've seen a lot of statistics about this phenomenon, and it's shocking (no pun). The best I can put together is that when I started in business in 1985, there were about 45,000 TV/radio service businesses in the USA. The last survey I saw (from the Professional Service Association) says that there are only a little more than 7,000 of us left. It appears that the manufacturers are not too worried about the drain. The way they build stuff now days, you often can't fix it anyway... |
I had a 20 year old Mitsubishi VCR that was good quality (when it did work). Lately the tuning circuits failed (specifically a 35V supply used to run circuits that run the varactor diodes. Almost got that fixed, and then I accidently send 27V into a digital PLL chip that expects at most 5V. That, coupled with a few other minor issues, was the death nell. Forget about trying to get a replacement PLL chip, and even if I could, the other issues would make it not worth the money and effort. So it got taken apart to get the circuit boards to toss in my junk box (still lots of non ASIC standard parts I could salvage), also salvaged the metric machine screws out of the mechanical part of the tape machine. Rest of it get placed in the comingled recycling bucket along with the empty beer cans and beer bottles. :-) Well, it is metal and plastic.
A few years ago in the next town over from here, we lost a local TV repair shop. Zenith sign. They did jukeboxes too. Building it was in was wood frame construction, a plumber installing some copper pipe with a blow torch set some wood smoldering and later that night the place burned down. Nobody was in there thankfully. A replacement building is almost done, but somehow I doubt that the TV repair shop will return....