If it breaks, can you fix it? Right-to-repair advocates vote yes.
Going back almost as far as he can recall, Ronnie Partridge took broken things and made them whole.
“I found stuff on the side of the road, and took it back to the house and made it work again. That’s how it all started,” says Mr. Partridge, who owns Ronnie’s Small Engine Repair here on the edge of Beaufort National Cemetery, deep in South Carolina Lowcountry.
A local mechanic hired him when he was 15 and, 10 years later, the student became the master. At the time, Mr. Partridge couldn’t afford to buy the shop. But the owner, upon retirement, gave him his collection of tools – many of which are still lying around his workshop, which he has owned for decades now.
Mr. Partridge says fixing stuff has always engaged his brain, but also calmed his soul. His admittedly “messy” workshop is a wonderland of parts and broken skeletons of lawn mowers past. Amid the tangle, he has the air of a grease-smeared monk – content with a knowledge that almost anything is fixable.
His is a thoroughly American story, woven throughout with self-determination, willpower, and an indomitable can-do attitude.
But today Mr. Partridge’s rise seems increasingly improbable: Fix-it shops have been in steady decline. RadioShack is gone from the mall. The corner camera shop is largely no more. Even longtime car mechanics have begun to throw in the shop towel as auto manufacturers make it increasingly difficult to fix their new models.
And corporations now retain stakes in the software driving their products, further complicating the repair landscape. As Wilmington Island, Georgia, computer technician Jim Moore puts it: “What do you own? Nothing. You own the plastic, that’s it.”
With consumers loath
