About when did shops start refusing to service tube sets?

[radiotvnut]

Of course, the time period would vary from shop-to-shop, but in about 1987, we had a 13" Japanese-built Truetone color set from the early '70s and it developed a vertical sync issue. It would work fine for a few minutes. Then, it would gradually start rolling and, at first, turning the hold control would lock the picture. Then, after a few more minutes, it got so bad that the hold control did nothing. I was in the 4th or 5th grade, at the time, and wasn't yet working on TVs.

Dad took it to several shops in town and all of them refused the job, once they saw it was a tube TV. I think one or two of them even went so far as to tell Dad to get that piece of junk out of their shop.

The final shop he took it to was in Jackson, MS (he had to be over there on business and knew the father of the guy who owned the shop). That guy told him, in no uncertain terms, "I don't work on anything with tubes in it." Dad said that by this time, he was tired of lugging the set around and when the shop offered to dispose of it for him, Dad left it there. Upon returning home, he bought a 13" knob tuned Emerson color set for $149.95 and it actually had a much better picture than the old Truetone.

By the '90s, I was working on TVs and I had a technician tell me that by the mid '80s, most tube sets were at least 10 years old and by that age, they start developing problems. He said a customer could bring one in this week for no sound and once that's fixed, it comes back next week for no picture and the customer expects a free repair (even though the second fault had nothing to do with the first). As the technician told me, "I'm not going to be married to some old worn out set, fixing it for free, when I could be working on sets with easier problems that I can actually make money on."

Then, it got to the point where some shops would not touch a TV over 10 years old, no matter rather it was tube or SS.

In the '90s, I would sometimes be asked to fix a tube TV and I would at least look at them. If I truly found that the set wasn't worth fixing, I'd tell the owner, but smarting off to the owner on the front end is a sure way to run them off and they'll never be back with anything.