I’m not confused - I’m not sure that I’m being clear. Because I said I don’t think a recession in itself makes enough of a difference to say that home repair is a not a recession-proof industry- and the examples I’m given have nothing to do with a recession. Your neighbor isn’t fixing his roof even though we’re not in a recession. And the other poster’s parents didn’t fix the water heater even though they can afford it and we aren’t in a recession.
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Someone not keeping up with maintenance/repairs when their income drops is different from those two examples.
I guess I’m the one who is confused. Because it seems to me that vast majority of home repairs are the kind that a person can do on their own (even if it just means jerry-rigging a stop-gap solution) or have a semi-skilled friend or neighborhood to help them with at low cost. It seems logical to assume that people will be more willing to pay a professional to do these things during good economic times and less likely to pay a professional to do these things during bad economic times. So to me it seems quite reasonable to assume that during a prolonged recession, some significant portion of repairmen will suffer from lack of work. I’m scratching my head trying to imagine how this would not be true when it’s true for all other services.
Granted, I don’t believe in the notion of a “recession-proof” industry outside of the vices (gambling, junk food, and alcohol). So maybe that’s why I’m so confused by what you’re saying.
Some examples of people avoiding repairs I’ve known:
Electricity is out. Run a cord from the neighbors.
Toilet doesn’t work. Put a bag in the bowl and throw the bag in the garbage.
Furnace goes out: Bundle up.
These went on for years.
I currently have a relative living in a disaster of a house. Multiple roof leaks in a wet climate, major dog waste damage to floors, etc. The owner (a relative) had plenty of money to fix it up. Just didn’t. Now another relative has inherited it and will sell it as a teardown. Much to the distress of the occupant- a rent-free disaster is better than paying real money, apparently.
Securing booms around tankers when they pull in to offload their cargo. I can’t see a feasible way that this could be automated.
It may have to do with you and I knowing very different types of people. The people I know basically fall into two groups - I know very few people who be willing to pay someone in good times but does it themselves in bad times. I can’t actually think of any, but there might be one or two. One group does the repairs themselves with the help of friends /relatives/neighbors if they can, but hire professionals when they don’t have the tools, expertise or license needed and the other group hires people for everything because they don’t know how to do anything.
BTW , recession-proof doesn’t actually mean that everyone in the industry will be able to find full-time work at good wages even in a recession - it means that people with those skills are more likely to find work in a recession that people with different skills or no skills.
That’s all behavior I associate with poverty. Even when the economy is bad and money is tight, most Americans aren’t going to be willing to shit in a bag. Most people are going to make it a priority to get their plumbing, furnace, and other quality of life repairs completed.
I don’t doubt that such people exist. I just don’t believe they’re anywhere within the norm.
Healthcare will be around, but that includes a lot of badly paid people who will change bedpans, clean floors, serve meals, etc., while jobs like radiology are divided into poorly paid technicians and skilled lowly paid radiologists in India. Heck, you can even get an app for doctor visits right now.
Maybe yes, maybe no. TV repairmen used to be a thing when TVs were expensive and you needed specialized tools to fix them. Nowadays it’s almost cheaper to buy a new one… I say almost, because if you have two brain cells and you’re willing to rub them together, you can often buy an entire motherboard and replace it yourself for half the cost of a new TV.
And we could go even further down that rabbit hole, but point being, if you are banking on the “fix broken thing” strategy, make sure the thing is going to exist in the future, and that it will continue to be hard to fix.
During the Great Recession “normal” people quickly found themselvse in quite desparate situations. I know people who lost houses and some that would have if they hadn’t gotten aid or deals with their bank.
When you don’t know if you’re going to be living in the same house you’ve lived in the last 20-30 years next month, fixing things up is really a low priority.
Depends on what you mean by “poverty”. Have jobs, etc. But suddenly money is tight and the house is underwater. It’s very difficult to deal with.
Forgot another thing. The person that died that I mentioned leaving a house also lived in another house for like 50 years. The heating system were these weird glass-like electric heating panels below the windows on the walls. Given their position and fragility they didn’t last long. So for something like 40+ years there was no built-in heat in the place. Space heaters were used. The person had quite a bit of money. So no “poverty” issues. Just didn’t want to spend the large amount of money to install a proper new heating system.
(And … the person who inherited the house has decided to move into it despite everyone else explaining that it’s a teardown as well. (It’s one of the most poorly designed houses I’ve ever seen.) And of course they don’t have the money to fix the heating issue so more decades of space heaters to ensue. But that’s not a “can’t fix right now due to …” situation.)
There’s all sorts of short term and long term things that result in repairs not being done. The Great Recession was a lulu of one.
I can’t see how you’d possibly know whether a particular person would operate like this, unless you’ve seen how they deal with a full range of bad times and a full range of home repair issues.
Like, I personally could see myself hiring an electrician if my electricity went out even if I didn’t have a job, provided I had a credit card. Because it’s really hard to do a job search without electricity. And it’s hard to have any hope when you’re sitting in a dark house. (And I really don’t trust myself to do any electric work!)
But if it’s the HVAC that isn’t working? Or the roof is leaky or the toilet is broken? I’d probably just come up with some work-arounds. I can buy a $199 window unit for my bedroom and get a tarp for the roof. The million DIY videos on youtube can help me figure out my toilet.
I really don’t think I’m that unusual in this regard, but YMMV.
I agree. Back when I was in the Navy, all I heard about was the push to close military bases. Most Navy bases are on the coast, so you would think that this would be desirable land from a development standpoint. Since I knew what an environmental disaster most old military bases are, I thought that a good field to get into would be environmental remediation. So before I got out of the Navy, I got an M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, with an emphasis on environmental engineering.
I spent the next few years trying to make a living with environmental site assessment and remediation, but it didn’t take long to find out that nobody wants to pay for this. Unless a regulator is making them do something about it, property owners are happy to simply ignore environmental issues on their land, which includes the owners of those military bases (i.e. the federal government). In the rare instance that a developer is interested in redeveloping a property with environmental issues, they only want to spend the bare minimum that will keep the regulators at bay. I found the whole experience to be very frustrating.
Do you know what people are willing to pay for? Water and sewer services. Fortunately, my degree qualified me for this work as well. It’s not glamorous, but at least it’s in demand. And more broadly, with the sorry state of the infrastructure in the U.S. (including the condition of dams and water supply systems, sewer collection and wastewater treatement plants, roads, bridges, etc.), this is one career that should be fairly secure. I hope this remains the case, as my son just graduated with a B.S. in Civil Engineering.
If someone is shocked that my husband can change a car battery or install a faucet or pumps his own gas, I don’t think that person is doing much beyond changing light bulbs. The old expression was " my toolbox holds a credit card and the yellow pages" - the expression needs updating, but there are plenty of people like that who have no problem saying so.
I don’t know that I think you’re unusual , but I am wondering why you would DIY the toilet even if you were working. Because I think maybe that’s the disconnect - people I know who feel comfortable doing a particular repair job do it whether they are employed or not. They are never going to hire someone to swap out the toilet, recession or not. And if they aren’t comfortable with electricity , they’re hiring someone,recession or not .
Ironically the florist end of the funeral business must have tanked. Almost every death announcement I see seems to say “In lieu of flowers, please…” which I don’t remember being as common in the 1990s.
My eagerness to pay someone to help me with a problem is tightly correlateld with how anxious I’m feeling about my future finances. If my wallet is fat, my brokerage account is doing well, and my future is bright, then I’m going to call in a repair person because ain’t nobody got time to be studying a toilet.
But if half the people in my office just got laid-off and I suspect I might be next? And I’m dealing with a more serious headache, like car troubles or a sick cat or a broken refrigerator? Or stress in my personal life (irrespective of money) has resulted in me living in embarrassing second-degree squalor? I might just try to fix that damn toilet myself. Because that way I don’t have to expend energy cleaning up the house. I don’t have to figure out how I’m going to be able to get off from work to meet the repairman. I don’t have to worry about someone running a scam on me.
(Actually, I wouldn’t trust myself to replace a toilet. Replace broken parts, sure. But I’m not about to lug a big-ass toilet around all by myself.)
Recession-resistant might be a better phrase. Just as an anecdote to back up both comments above:
I had to have a wooden window replaced in an old house, so I got a fellow who owns a small hand-built window shop to fabricate one. Chatting with him about the big recession, he noted that he had been right on the verge of expanding - leasing more warehouse space and hiring on a few more craftsman right before the recession hit. He hesitated, unsure if he really wanted to run that large of a business and give up some of his hands-on role in fabrication/installation for administrative work. Good thing he did because when the recession hit he was scrambling. He weathered it because he does good work at a good price and there was just enough demand to keep his small business afloat. But it was pretty tight for a few years - if he had expanded he would have had to lay off every single new hire and that bigger lease obligation would have put him on the edge.
Skilled tradesman in repair service industries are somewhat recession-resistant. But they are definitely not recession-proof.
It’s not 100% clear that this is the case. We’ve already transitioned to the case where a lot of house frames are built in a factory, and we’ve already transitioned to the case where a lot of factory jobs are automated, and the Chinese in particularly are working on modular buildings, where the only on-site job is connecting them up (so far this has been restricted to buildings like hotels, where the rooms are mostly standard).
And most of the cost in an expensive electrical car is the battery. And there isn’t a lot to fix in an electric motor: it’s already pretty rare to rewind them.
I work for the USPS, performing corrective and preventive maintenance on the machinery used to sort the mail. According to the APWU’s contract, I cannot be laid off. I also cannot be compelled to retire due to age.
So, as long as:
- Both of those clauses remain in force;
- The Postal Service continues to exist; and
- I remain physically capable of performing my duties,
I will continue to be employed (my master plan is to start collecting the full value of what’s left of my Social Security award when I become eligible, and stay on the job. Perhaps by the time I’m ninety or so, I’ll have my IRA funded to the point where kaylasmom and I can live on the annuity from that, combined with SocSec and my FERS entitlement).
I’d have thought that this would be automated by computers by now, but apparently it isn’t. I have a side gig making those boring ads you see on news websites and the like. They send me the dimensions of the ad, the photo to be placed in the ad, the size of the blank white space to be placed on the ad, the text that needs to be typed into the blank white space, and the button that goes underneath. All I do is drag and drop things into place, basically. Assembly. It’s all decided ahead of time and doesn’t really require any thought by me other than making sure it looks nice. And yet a computer can’t do it and I get paid $50 an hour.
If they can’t even do this simple task, the complicated stuff I can do will be safe for a long, long time, and possibly forever. The creative jobs like making illustrations are the ones computers will not be able to replace.
Yeah, but the need for people who can do tune-ups is right out. As cars get more electric there will be fewer mechanical things to break, and with more computers you get more self diagnosis which should drive prices down. There will still be mechanics, just fewer of them.
People who do body work on the other hand …