I thought I was doing well to last in the trade until September, 2005.
The general public purse-strings were being tightened in the early 90's (also a recession around that time), by the mid/late 90's the general public were a lot less inclined to spend say £35 on a repair including service (VCR for example) when they could buy an unknown brand from their local supermarket for an additional £20 with a years warranty. Trying to explain, this is their machines first repair in 10 years & with my efforts would last a further 10, fell on deaf ears. Yet a few years before, replacing £300 video heads on £1200 machines was an 'every other day' occurrence. The amount of S-VHS/HiFi machines we saw, were clearly be used heavily, & they were happy to pay.
Needless to say, later on, 'they' seemed happy to buy new equipment every couple of years when a new 'must-have' featured appeared. Radio repairs were non-existent by then, we saw lots of TV's & VCR's, even HiFi as we know it was going out of 'general' favour, space & 'cheap as possible' being the order of the day.
Contract work in the commercial audio/visual sector kept us afloat, we too saw items coming in from the public, giving free estimates & then sets not being collected! Inspection fees where soon introduced, the cost of which offset against the final repair.
For us the closure of Willowvale plus SEME diversifying was a blow to our 'to hand' spares acquisition of TV/video recorder service spares. Obtaining service information & special test jigs for later models from big name brands was nigh-on impossible in the end, as these were essential items for camcorders/surface mount equipment/double sided piggy-back PCB's ... we could only fight for so long ...
The escape room here at home takes me back to those earlier, halcyon days of yore, whistling line stages, crackly radios, lots of volts, hot valves, old solder and occasionally, a nod to health & safety
I wish John a happy & fun-filled retirement
All the best,
Mark