Do we need more mechanics?

We always need people who know how things work, small engine or large. It’s nice that you can design a jet engine, but it’s even nicer that you can fix my car when it’s sick so I can get to work.

Yes, but unfortunately we’re steering (ha) our young people away from those jobs. : (

Yes, absolutely. We need more durable products and products that can be repaired. We need to evolve beyond the throwaway society because of Earth’s limited resources. We need a cradle-to-cradle society.

Why do people shut down these shops? It’s probably because they can’t make enough money. That means that people don’t need these services. You may wish that people need those people, but clearly we are doing just fine without. Otherwise there would be enough demand to support people going into that kind of business.

We’re in a throw it away and buy a new one age. Repair shops are shutting down right and left. It’s too expensive to repair things. You can buy a new one for twice what it costs to repair it, and it’ll talk to you and take messages, as well. God knows what services the next generation of appliances will offer.

@wundayatta: Read again. The owners of the automotive shop retired after about 50 years in business. The sons of the owners, however, choose to go on to college rather than take over the shop.

The mower shop we ran for the last 4 years had been around forever. A business that is alive for decades IS making it. We just couldn’t because we simply didn’t have the operating capital to keep us afloat through hard times, until we got out of our original business debt. The income during spring and summer was more than sufficient, but the winters just killed us. Starting your own business, like that one, is a young person’s job, not someone who isn’t far from retirement.

I believe the demand is there, but the mentality for supplying it isn’t.

@Dutchess_III It sounds like you don’t trust the market. You just told me the demand wasn’t there for you. I have no idea what you mean by mentality. Maybe you mean the willingness to beat yourself to death to keep a business going when you could have a regular life making more money working for someone else. You might even be doing something you enjoy, instead of being in the family business that you don’t really care for.

The market is working. You have to trust that those kids made a rational choice for themselves. You yourself say starting a business is a young person’s job—meaning it is not your job. Another rational decision, I would think.

It’s just that the young people don’t think it’s their job, either, and I would agree with them. I don’t think running a business is a young person’s job, unless you have an MBA. There is too much you need to know to learn it on the job, even if you have been born to the business. You have to understand finance and marketing and the products themselves. Too much for a young person without a lot of training.

Not even you could figure out how to get the operating capital for winter, and you have all kinds of experience. I think you are overlooking the real difficulties in running a business these days. Clearly, you understand what they are, but somehow you imagine that for others (young people, no less) it would be easier. I think you are just indulging in wishful thinking. It would be nice if people were willing to work their asses off for little return, but I don’t think that’s reasonable to expect, and neither do you. If you did, you’d still be in the business.

I don’t know about we but I need more mechanics and plumbers and carpenters and handymen…..

Two days ago, after begging, I was able to find a young woman to clean my refrigerator and wash some windows. She really wanted to declutter my closets, re-arrange my pictures and put all my loose stuff into tidy baskets. I had to grovel.

@gailcalled Boy! That sounds like work!

@wundayatta: Which part? She considers herself a professional house organizer and gets $40/hr for teaching people how to throw things our or put them into drawers.

@gailcalled First read “grovel” as “growl!”

@janbb: I would have been willing to do that also.

Cleaning a refrigerator and washing windows—that is hard work! Organizing closets is a lot easier.

^^ True. Which is why I need the heavy lifting; I can organize my own closets without endangering either my knees or lower back

I think we do, its is hard to find some people in that field.

We desperately need good mechanics, but we do not need “part changers” that call themselves mechanics

In California, mechanics is taught in the prisons, because there is such a crying need for them.

@wundayatta You…are making a whole lot of assumptions without knowing the ins and outs.
1) The demand WAS there, in spades, during the spring and the summer. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the market. I had good reason to know the market was not there during the winter. I went thorough 4 winters and after 4 years, I was just too damn tired and frustrated to try any more. We had no savings, no insurance, no retirement, nothing.
If we could have hung in we could have found a product that would have gotten us through the winters comfortably. We actually found something during that last year that could have done just that, but it would have taken a couple more years to get everything in place, but I realized it was never going to be what we had hoped. We just didn’t have enough time. We didn’t have enough years left. We didn’t have enough energy left. That another reaslon why I say a physically demanding business like that is best left to the kids.

2) The people who owned the car repair shop started it in the 50’s. They were young then. I have no idea if they took it over from their family or whether or not they borrowed money from family or where they got their operating capital, but they were young. When you’re young you can live in a one bedroom crackerbox. A kid can live on close to nothing but excitement during the early years until the business starts actually making money.
When my husband and I took over the mower shop that had also been around for several years we had several disadvantages right off the bat. One was that I had teen age kids at home and a pretty hefty mortgage. Buying the shop wasn’t my idea but…my husband was sure we could make a go of it. And if we had been able to sacrifice what ever we could we WOULD have made a go of it, and we could have made money—eventually. We didn’t have “eventually” and there were somethings I wasn’t willing to sacrifice. My house, that I had worked hard for was one thing, although it was teetering on the edge of foreclosure many, many times.

As far as the sons who didn’t take over their parent’s auto repair shop..you said it yourself. They made the best decision for themselves, and they went off to college, where most of our young people seem to be heading, which is good, but at the same time they’re getting the message that blue collar work is shameful or something, and that’s not good. Blue collar workers can make a LOT of money, if they’re good.

I did ask this question which is somewhat related to this one, but I had attempted to tackle the issue at the compulsory schooling level. Interestingly the enrollment at our local vo-techs at the high school level has dropped down so much that they are literally thinking about closing it down (sad day in my opinion).

I’m not sure exactly why vo-tech enrollment has dropped so much while the level of attendence at post secondary vocational schools has actually increased. I’m also rather surprised that more than half of the students that I know who obtained a 4 year degree are actually attending alot of these post secondary vocational schools. I think the answer to your question would likely be found in the compulsory educational levels.

There are low skilled and high skilled blue collar workers. There are also gold collar workers, usually involved in more technical fields. Some of the higher skilled blue collar workers are required to have more education than many white and/or gold collar fields. Some of the most elite maintenance positions require a journeyman level in millwrighting/mechanical, machining, hydronic systems, pnuematical systems, hydraulic systems, electrical systems, electronics, PLC/parameter programming, etc, etc, etc.

I have said this before, I am a dog groomer and I work with an archaeologist with a Phd, an anthropologist with a masters and another who has a degree in environmental science or something like that. They are grooming because in the current economic climate with government funding becoming more difficult to attain, they cannot find jobs in their chosen fields. If they were carpenters, plumbers, welders, etc. they would have no problem finding a job. They have no problem finding a job as a groomer. So yep I completely agree. This idea that a college degree is a must for everyone is absurd. A bachelors degree doesn’t get you very far in any field these days. Unless a kid wants to go to school for another 6 years or so after the first 12, then they would be much better off learning a trade. I think society has reached the point where it looks down on tradespeople as being something less than a college graduate. I am much happier as a dog person than I ever was in a corporate setting.

@Dutchess_III You keep saying contradictory things. In one paragraph you say the demand was there, and in the very next, you say it wasn’t. You distinguish between summer and winter, but that’s a useless distinction, because the shop has to be a year round operation. You got out of the business because the demand wasn’t there. If it had been there, we wouldn’t be talking about this. It is inappropriate to look at half a year and say the demand is there. That’s not the whole story.

I’m pointing this out not to try to argue about nits, but really to talk about the market. The market spoke. You guys got out of the business and no one bought it from you (unless I missed something). There is no reason why a young person would want to make the sacrifices you thought a young person should make. Times are different. They can make more money doing other things.

To me, there is nothing wrong with a mower business and I have no disrespect for blue collar jobs. But I believe in the market. If people can make more money doing blue collar work and it isn’t too hard, they’ll do it. Otherwise, not. Status has nothing to do with this stuff any more. It’s all about the bucks.

@wundayatta – do you really believe this, “Status has nothing to do with this stuff any more. It’s all about the bucks?” I think if that were the real deal, there would be a lot less parents pushing their kids towards college instead of a trade. At least I feel that is the case in Australia.

It wasn’t there during the winter, @wundayatta. It was a lawn mower repair shop. Think about it. Yes, we sold and serviced chainsaws and snow blowers and leaf blowers and dinky stuff like that during the winter so there was a tiny demand, and we manged to scrape by through 4 of those ball busting winters, but it just wasn’t worth it.

Put it this way…our monthly gross went from $35,000+ a month during the spring, to about $25,000 a month during the summer, slowly dropping down to about $7,000 during the months of November through January, sometimes as low as $3000. That money had to support the shop expenses as well as our house hold expenses. We were in the hole by the time spring came around again. Do you understand now?

Oh, and the older mower shop folks in surrounding towns that had been in the business since they were in their 20’s were close to wealthy by the time they hit their 50’s. So if you can stick it out for 10 years, get all of your initial operating expenses / loans, etc paid off, and start buying the whole goods outright instead of floor planning them, and all the headaches that comes with that, then have another 20 years to save you CAN make it. It takes money to make money.

Small business ownership is a learn-as-you-go kind of thing, too, and the missteps can be disastrous if you don’t have anything in the bank for backup or to get you out.

Here the guys who mow (in hot demand) also plow driveways during the snow season (also in hot demand.) Everyone treats them with deference.

Many of the residents, like me, have serious driveways. Mine, for example, is 3/10 mile long. My guy makes a very nice income for both jobs. He operates out of his home and his wife does the billing and books. HIs expenses are the truck and equipment.

I also have almost an acre of lawn and old field that gets mowed and one large field that gets brush-hogged at high summer.

Instead of advertising, these men and women have to beat off new customers with a large broom.

They do repair work informally as do many of the people who work at the local large hardware stores, like Ace an the huge John Deere retail outlet. This is different, I do understand, from city and suburban retail repair shops.

@gailcalled Yes, we looooved our custom cutters! But they had the same kind of problem. If it snowed, great! We had business and they had business. But if it was a mild winter, and nothing was growing and nothing was snowing it was just dead.

Sad as it sounds, we loved natural “disasters” to death, especially in the winter. Lord, spring is coming now. I remember that feeling of desperate, desperate relief when things slowly started turning green. I don’t miss that. It’s nice to enjoy what ever weather happens along for it’s own merit. Not for what it’s going to mean to us financially.

@Dutchess_II: True. We had an unseasonably mild and snow-free winter, leaving my guy with time to sharpen and repair his tools and equipment and twiddle his thumbs. I bumped into him somewhere recently and he said that it was pleasant not to have to get up at 4:00 AM but he did miss the income.

But this means he will start mowing earlier than last spring. I am planting nasturtium, zinnia, and morning glory seeds in flats in my living room today to get a head start. My sister has tomatoes and peppers growing on her window sills also.

What’s happening with your plans for the charming new house?

Well, How did you know I almost posted about the land here! Yesterday was the first decently warm day we had. We took a friend of Rick’s out to look at it, and they discussed water diversion. We have fields all to the east, and they drain onto our land, which is part of what gives us one of the most marvelous ponds a person could ask for (it is also spring fed, and was the only pond around that didn’t dry up completely during the drought last summer,) but also can cause some water problems in other parts of the land. So we nailed down the best way to control it all. All we need is a bulldozer. :( I bought Rick a bush hog for $150 over Christmas, but we don’t have a tractor to haul it. I’m just screaming at the idea of going a few thousand into debt some MORE but…we almost have to. We aren’t going to hire anyone to do what we can do ourselves with a tractor and a bucket and a scraper and a chainsaw and elbow grease.

@Dutchess_III: Lovely. Can you trade some sweat equity for a tractor to use with the brush hog? You know, you drive your tractor, I’ll brush hog your fields.

If the wetlands are far enough from the house to leave your basement alone, turn them into wetlands. Plant cattails, marsh marigolds, wet foot iris, skunk cabbage and leave it alone for the birds and frogs and muskrats and beavers.

My sister has a resident pack of muskrats who are happily but systematically eroding the sides of the pond.

Well, sure. There will be some of that. I mean, all of our neighbors are farmers. It’s just getting to know them and begin to have that kind of a relationship. But we really do need a tractor of our own. Well, my husband is probably looking at a raise within the next couple of months, and I should get one in July so….well. As much as I hate to say it (and don’t tell my husband) I don’t think we’ll be able to actually start building the house until next year. I think we can get plenty done with our own blood, sweat and tears before we can actually afford the equipment.

Man…I need to get the land google earthed so you can see it. The “wet lands” are exactly where we want to build! But they aren’t quite wet enough to do what you say…although that would be sooo awesome! They’re wet only when it rains. And we’ve already decided no basement. Much of the mess was created by people before us digging earth out helter skelter for whatever reason. There is a culvert at one side, but nothing really drains to it! Also, there are no ditches along side of the road, so the county needs to come make some.