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But the repairman's biggest, loudest beef of all is directed squarely at his meal ticket—the appliance-owning U.S. public. "The public has more chiselers and stupid jerks in it than any place else," says an angry Pittsburgh appliance dealer. "Everyone wants a bargain, but when the cut-rate, $100 TV set goes fizzle and the repairman's bill comes to $25, the customer refuses to pay." Manufacturers are partly to blame; while the auto owner has learned by long experience to expect occasional repairs, few appliancemakers emphasize the question of service. Even so, say repairmen, the public usually brings much of the trouble on itself. Some 30% of all service calls are "nuisance" calls, such as explaining the operation of appliances to people who never bother to read the instructions, and argue, as did one Washington matron: "Why should I? I know how to run these things without reading about them." In New Orleans a housewife phoned angrily that her new freezer was defrosting; the repairman found it was unplugged. In Maple Shade, NJ. an infuriated motorist called the service station to tow his stalled car away; the mechanic found that the owner had forgotten to push the "drive" button on his new pushbutton transmission. And in Chicago repairmen for General Electric have been trying for years to convince a lady that her refrigerator does not leak—the trouble is her dog.
Failure at the Top. In the middle, between repairman and customer, are the manufacturers and big utilities, whose sales and reputations suffer with each new breakdown or complaint. Repairs is one of their major problems, and they are the ones who are working hardest to solve it. Says Judson Sayre, president of the Norge Division of Borg-Warner Corp., waving a letter from a Cleveland housewife: "Look at this stack of repair bills she enclosed. I don't blame that woman one bit. She's unhappy. I'd be unhappy too. It's a failure in leadership, not the fault of underlings. The guy who licks the service problem is going to wind up on top in this industry." Yet Sayre has no illusions about the size of the task. When a family friend was recently charged $46.50 just to install a new washer, he angrily advised her not to pay, said he would pay the costs of any lawsuit.
For the company that does succeed in providing prompt and efficient service, the rewards are well worth the effort. Starting in 1903, Detroit Edison Co. began giving customers free light bulbs, largely as a publicity stunt, soon went on to free electric cords and fuses. Last year the company sent 275 repairmen on 160,000 fuse calls, 138,000 stove-service assignments, 456,000 other appliance missions, charging nothing for labor and only for parts totaling more than $1. The company knows that nothing cuts electricity sales faster than a dead light bulb, a dead dishwasher, a dead freezer. And though the service cost Detroit Edison some $7,000,000 last year, it paid untold dividends in bigger sales—to say nothing of customer relations.