ETNA, Pa. — Virginia Vinski-Fischer hadn’t planned on taking over her father’s appliance business when he asked her to work with him in 1965.
She was busy raising three children, all under the age of 10, and refrigerators and TVs weren’t foremost on her mind.
“When you’re in your early 20s, are you thinking about washing machines?” But she joined her father, George, handling the bookkeeping and sales for Vinski Brothers on Butler Street in this former steel town outside Pittsburgh.
Five decades later, she runs the shop with her husband, John Fischer, who handles deliveries, installations, and repairs.
“We are both 77 years old, and we’re doing all our own work,” she said. “We know the business. We’re personal. This isn’t like a chain store where they just point to a price.”
The face of the once-smoky town of Etna, Pa. has changed — U.S. Steel’s Isabella furnace there closed in 1954, and other mills in the area followed. Meanwhile, shopping habits evolved, with business shifting toward national chains and online browsing in the years since Vinski Brothers opened in 1946.
Yet the appliance shop and service center has held its own against big box stores. Of course, Vinski Brothers operates by word-of-mouth marketing rather than TV spots.
“We’ve had some of the same customers for 50 years,” Mrs. Vinski-Fischer said. “We were serving the parents, then their children, and then their grandchildren.” Most of those customers come from communities within easy reach of the store.
Vinski Brothers is still operated out of a century-old, three-story home originally purchased by Mrs. Vinski-Fischer’s grandmother, Anna Vinski. Her husband, Joseph, worked at the Isabella furnace.
These days, much of the shop’s core business is appliance installations, upgrades, and repairs.
The appliance repair business is getting trickier now that more appliances have gone digital. Digital components can make products more complex to fix and maintain. But the other side of that is the idea of planned obsolescence — if a flat screen TV breaks today, it’s likely cheaper and easier to buy a new one than fix the old one.
While Mrs. Vinski-Fischer took over the business from her father, she and her husband said they’re not sure what will happen to the shop when they step down at some point in the future. Their three children have pursued other careers.
“I guess we’ll sell it to someone who has the ambition and knowledge about the business,” Mr. Fischer said.
Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Stephanie Ritenbaugh is a reporter for the Post-Gazette.
First Published November 1, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
