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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.