TV repair shop pulling the plug

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports:

Steve Rubstello is in no mood to talk -- a fact he's prepared to explain at length.

There's nothing left to say, he continued, pushing past drifts of gutted cases, dusty repair manuals, cardboard boxes, circuit boards and coiled, tangled nests of electrical wire that once were the central nervous systems for televisions.

"We live in a throwaway society," said the 60-year-old repairman and soon-to-be former owner of Adams TV in Fremont. "It got to where I just couldn't fight that anymore."

He's done fighting. He's done talking. He's making plans to work for someone else for the first time in decades. His last boss, other than himself, was his dad, Chester, who founded Adams TV in 1952.

A former radio repairman, Chester called it Adams (his middle name) because it sounded less ethnic and, at five letters, cost less to light up than Rubstello.

Originally, the repair and sales shop sat in downtown Fremont. In 1970, Adams moved it uphill, past the Buckaroo, to its current location on Fremont Avenue North across from American Music.

Here, Adams stayed busy as TVs evolved from tubes to solid-state to chips. From picture tubes to flat panel. From LCD to plasma to super HD. From a novelty to near necessity.

Nielsen Media Research says that in 1975, 57 percent of American households had one television. Today, 50 percent have three or more. The average American household now has slightly more TVs (2.73) than residents (2.55).

While these numbers rankle anti-TV crusaders, they inspire the businesses that sell them. But an odd thing happened as televisions became flatter, smaller, bigger and more sophisticated -- as they reached into buses and airplanes and cars and waiting rooms.

They also became cheaper, flimsier, more replaceable. These facts are less inspiring to those who fix them.

"Back then, in the 1950s and '60s, you see your TV repairman every eight months or so," Rubstello said while packing up boxes. "When solid state came out, you'd get a set fixed less often, but the repairs cost more."

This was the bread and butter for Adams and other repair shops. Several televisions a day to fix. But it's trickled down to just three a week -- on a good week. The big-box stores long ago got into the television sales business. This hurt, too, and not just in sales.

Said Rubstello: "I had this guy not long ago, he bought $2,000 in Toshiba stuff at one of those stores. Then he called me for free advice on how to get it set up because, of course, the people who sell it don't know. But I refused. What was he thinking?"

A sign of the times.