Car Talk: The Opening of the Garage
Glenn M.: How did you get started as garage owners?
Tom: He forced me into it. When I was still working I was the long-range planner for the company …
Ray: His long-range plan was to retire!
Tom: … to retire or to quit. But as a long-range planner, I was looking at all kinds of trends - what was happening in the world, blah, blah, blah. I realized that the cost of various things was going up, especially automobile repair. So, I came up with the idea of a do-it-yourself auto-repair shop, where people would come, and we would give them advice and the tools, and they would fix their own cars.
I made the mistake of mentioning it to my brother. This was when I had quit my jobs and I was hanging around Harvard Square drinking coffee. It was beautiful. I mentioned this to Ray, and he said, "That's a great idea. Let's do it!" I said, "No, that would be w-w-w-work."
Tom: I put him off for months, and somehow he just kept at me, "Let's do it, let's …"
Ray: I'll tell you exactly why. My wife and I were living in Vermont. Living the good life; I was teaching school; we were growing radishes in the back yard. Everything was wonderful.
Mom called, like every week, as you'd expect. If I didn't call her, she'd call me. She would say:
"Your brother quit his job at Foxboro," "Yeah, I know Mom."
"I'm really worried about him." "I know, Mom."
"He's becoming a bum." "I know, Mom.
"Have you seen him lately?" "I know, Mom."
"Do something." "What am I going to do?"
And then he happens to mention this idea of the do-it-yourself garage. I didn't want to do it. I was living like Don King up there in Vermont!
Tom: You hated it.
Ray: I did. The winters were interminable!
Tom: He said the gas station is open by appointment only!
Ray: I didn't hate it, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.
Tom: Well, they hated you then.
Ray: Maybe that was it. So, I came back to rescue my brother because our mother felt that he was sinking down into this abyss, this life of dissipation and worthlessness -
Tom: And she was right!
Ray: So, that's how it came to pass that we opened the shop.
Glenn M.: What was the name of the garage?
Ray: The original garage was Hacker's Haven but it had some problems.
Glenn M.: Did the “do-it-yourself” concept catch on?
Ray: The business plan Tom had devised was brilliant. Obviously that was his forte -forecasting the future. He had considerable business acumen and I thought that I would be able to jump on and ride his coattails to riches. We thought that our biggest challenge would be getting wheelbarrows big enough to load all the money for the trip to the bank. We envisioned ourselves standing there in pristine white lab coats, rocking back and forth, giving occasional demos and advice.
Tom: “Hey, put that a little to the right.”
Ray: “Tighten that to 22.” That couldn't have been farther from what happened. We had every moron, idiot, screw-up imaginable who came into our shop and expected that they would take the cars apart, have a pile of a thousand pieces and then say, "duh … I can't put it together. Can you do it?"
You know, I can put stuff together if I've taken it apart, but if someone else has taken it apart it's pretty tough. So eventually, we ended up spending hours and hours holding hands with these people, trying to get their cars back on the road. We felt a social responsibility, because we had advertised: “We can help you, our children.”
And they came in, and we couldn't help them! And there was not one night that I made it home before 11 pm. We opened up at 9:00 in the morning, and there was not one night that I made it home to see Johnny Carson's monologue. So we realized immediately that plan wasn't going to work. At least it wasn't going to work with us doing all the work.