Abstract

"Viewer Beware: TV Repair Fraud, Technological Complexity, and Consumer Vulnerability"

Richard Popp, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (popp@uwm.edu)

For many Americans in the postwar years, buying a first television set was a veritable rite of passage into a “consumers’ republic” of household comfort and convenience. For many, it was also a source of considerable frustration. A TV set was among the most expensive purchases one could make and their advanced electronics rendered them, for most viewers, a quintessential ‘black box’ of technological inscrutability. These liabilities became all the more evident when receivers broke or malfunctioned and consumers were left to navigate the murky waters of the TV repair business. In the later 1940s and 1950s, television servicing grew into a sizable auxiliary of the consumer electronics industry. It also became known as a hotbed of fraud and duplicity. Shady repairmen had a whole arsenal of tricks at their disposal: bait-and-switch pricing, passing off shoddy “rejuvenated” tubes as new, tampering with internal electronics on routine service calls, and “pulling” sets into their shops in order to bill for unperformed labor. This paper explores how these practices and efforts to combat them played out in the context of postwar New York, locus to the greatest concentration of television sets in the nation. It draws on the records of investigations by the New York Consumer Counsel, muckraking exposes such as David Caplovitz The Poor Pay More (1963), and coverage of repair fraud in the consumer-electronics trade press and New York’s news. In so doing, it shows how, not just the sale, but the possession, use, and stewardship, of products created opportunities for exploitation. With a product like television, the fact that consumers had already sunk considerable resources into its purchase, structured household routines around its use, and developed a level of dependency on it for entertainment likely left them all the more vulnerable to fraud.