>Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:36:07 -0700 rob at mccallpiano.com wrote: > > ...they already have a tuner that comes by once or twice a year (I can't remember which he said...), but on a regular schedule. > > The interesting part is that the tuner is from Texas! Realize that I live in Southern California. They told me this tuner travels around and is booked up to a year in advance, traveling all over the country to tune. > > Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? Or maybe it's one of us on the list? Talk about a mileage charge... :-) I'd be curious how this tuner runs a successful business with a perceived high level of overhead (food, gas, lodging, etc.). Or maybe he operates out of a motorhome? Nonetheless, it seemed like an intriguing concept if not somewhat impractical, for me at least. Rob, I don't know how prevalent this is now, but even as recently as the mid 1970s (when I lived in New Mexico, and before I got into the piano business) I heard of so called "route tuners" who serviced mostly rural areas, where there was insufficient population density to support a resident tuner. (I think in our area there was a guy out of Texas who worked New Mexico and southern/western Colorado back then...) They worked just like your guy - schedule tunings way in advance, come into an area, spend a week or two there (probably had regular arrangements for housing), tune all the pianos within a reasonable driving radius, and then move on to the next area, traveling in a loop that brought them back home. They lived on the road for months at a time... With growing suburbanization, urban sprawl and rural towns becoming bedroom communities for large cities due to a more efficient transportation network (Interstate highways), it became possible for resident tuners to survive in formerly rural areas - so these "route tuners" became mostly obsolete. Most probably retired - and couldn't sell their "routes" (I have seen "routes" advertised for sale...). And this lifestyle doesn't seem to be conducive to producing heirs to the business... But I guess that between Texas and Southern California there is still enough rural small-town America left to keep this route tuner in business - along with loyal long-time customers in now urbanized areas like your piano store owner... Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101013/184a2eb3/attachment.htm>
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