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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.: