Who needs piano technicians?

[Wimblees@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 1/11/01 5:45:01 AM Central Standard Time, 
djweiss57@hotmail.com writes:

<< I am searching for a good place to locate a piano technician business. 
I've 
 been using the internet to find the population and number of technicians in 
 a given area.  But I need one more statistic--is there any way to figure out 
 the "piano density" of an area?

Many years ago, Kimball did a survey and found that if you took a given 
geographical area, and multiplied it by 19%, that is about how many pianos 
there should be. Of course there are lots of variables involved, such as 
overall economic conditions, size of the area covered, etc., but it gets you 
in the ball park. This doesn't mean that 19% of the homes have pianos. It 
means that between churches, school, hotel, and homes, there are that many 
pianos. 

Now the other side of that equation is, how many pianos do you need to make a 
living?  I think a piano technician, doing mostly tuning and minor repairs, 
should be able to make a decent living if the area in which the technician 
wants to work has about 1500 - 2000 pianos. Given that a tuner can tune about 
25 pianos per week, which is about 1200 tunings per year, you would need that 
many pianos, because only about one-third of the pianos are being tuned. The 
rest either never get tuned, or get tuned about once every 10 years, whether 
it needs it not.
 
 Furthermore, is this the best way to go about this search?  How have other 
 people conducted such a search?  Has the journal done any articles on this 
 subject? >>

I don't know if the Journal has done any research. But if you want to do this 
on your own, pick out a geographical area, and write to the chamber of 
commerce, and ask how many pianos tuners there are. If the number of tuners 
is less than what the area can support, move there and hang out a shingle. 

Please keep in mind, however, that there usually twice as many piano tuners 
working than the chamber of commerce might be aware of. In greater St. Louis 
metropolitan area, there are only 40 piano tuners listed in the phone book, 
and another 40 tuners that I know of that are not in the phone book, both 
full time and part time. And we should be able to support about 200 tuners. 

Willem Blees