Modern Vespa

jimc made a comment on another post about how we seem to just throw away easily fixable products these days. Large Appliances, TVs, small appliances, electronics... It's all become disposable. This reminded me of when I was a kid. There was a shop in the industrial warehouse part of town that everyone called the "Fix-It Shop". I don't know if that was really the name. But they fixed anything and everything. Lawn mowers, tillers, bicycles, TVs, large and small appliances... It seemed like you could find it all there to be repaired. It was a dark and dusty place, but as a kid it was one of my favorite places to visit. I imagine most towns had a place like this in the 1960s. They seem to have disappeared today. Did your town have a "Fix-it Shop"? Do any of you still know of a place like this that's still in business?

The closest thing to a repair shop in my home town was an informal bike repair clinic, run by a bicycle enthusiast. It was very popular among the kids of my age, growing up in the early to mid 70s. He had a barn full of salvaged bikes to pull parts off of, a haphazard collection of tools, and stocked various consumables (tires, innertubes, chains) that he sold at cost. The philosophy was to teach the kids how to repair their own bicycles, a skill that I am grateful to have learned and that served me well in life.

So it was with some nostalgia that I read recently of a "repair café" event happening semi-regularly at various libraries in my area:

https://repaircafesv.org

Back in the '50s and '60s in the UK, in Cheam, Surrey, there was a shop called Sargent's. Sold everything from lawn mowers to model railways - and mended everything too. You could get your wireless batteries charged up!

I remember a local fix it place in my neighborhood growing up.. They worked on coffee percolators, toasters, mixers, stove, refrigerator - any home appliance. Now that's my job.
I think a lot of this disposable stuff these days came out when the country became more mobile. People switching jobs, moving house and many of the appliances would get left behind. Why spend more money on something if you were going to move in a few years? That and people started to cheap out. A product made overseas was cheaper, so that was bought instead of the coffee percolator that was rebuildable but now considered old fashion. Remember the Mr. Coffee machines? Dead cheap compared to a product that was going to last a lifetime rather than something you may get 10 years out of - or less. Planned obsolescence became the new idea, and it was a race to the bottom on how cheap you could build a product and have it work - for a while any way, usually a day longer than when the warrantee ran out.

nope

There's a shop in Plymouth called Vanrigge it's been there forever, I remember my dad first talking me there in the early 70s, I still use them to this day. They don't repair but they do supply everything you need to repair your appliances no matter how old and free advise. It's basically a house with a shop front on it and when you go in and ask for a part one of the guys wanders off and you can usually hear him moving around upstairs moving boxes and opening cabinets and then about 10 minutes later he'll come back with the part you need! It's great, we need to keep places like this and stop throwing so much away.

You're making me wax nostalgic about my dad. He wasn't into fiddling with electronics, but he had skills and enough patience to have a go at a ton of things. He'd disassemble an antique door lock, braze the spring or whatever broke, throw it together, and good to go. He was a combination of a tinkerer and someone desperate to save money at all costs (mostly way too much time). He kept a stockpile of mom's old small appliances just in case they could be cannibalized for parts.

Quite a few neighbors would drop by to ask him to do welding and other jobs. Pretty sure he was bad at charging for his work.

I used to razz him for earning himself like a dollar an hour for his time, but I've come to appreciate the joy of using ones' problem-solving and engineering skills on the plus side. On the negative side, it allowed him to practice the art of creative swearing. Having spent much of his life in Depression-era poverty, I'm pretty sure that was a driver as well.