Thirty years ago, a cell phone was something out of Jules Verne. Portable telephones were the newest thing. It was considered amazing when you could carry the entire phone with you to a different room, but if you dared bring it out of doors, weaker signals had a tendency to break up in the manner of transistor radios, another popular hand-held device that truly was portable.
By 1985, transistor radios were virtually obsolete. In the 1960s and early 1970s, these Marconi-spawned gadgets were ubiquitous as the children, often male baseball addicts, who carried them around everywhere except perhaps in the shower, which might have been shocking to some.
These days, cell phones along with their electronic contemporaries and offspring - IPods and IPhone, Blackberries and Xboxes, Playstation incarnations and the versatile Wii, along with their laptop computerized cousins (although many of these devices possess LCD screens which resemble miniature desktop flat screen computer monitors) - have become as ubiquitous as transistor radios once were, perhaps much more so. The irony is that on many of these devices including cell phones, a user can not only watch an entire baseball game of their choice live, but bring up a variety of multimedia visual treats as they do so - baseball stats of their favorite players or teams, historical footage and documentaries, you name it, and baseball is only the tip of the interactive Wii. As for the ubiquitous cell phone, in some cases people too impoverished to own a pair of shoes own a cheap cell phone, and yet the logical entrepreneurial step of franchising cell phone repair businesses is not ubiquitous. But one gets the impression it will be soon.
One company with more than 20 locations around the U.S. has already established a presence, initiated when they were merely a cell phone repair business. Their name, like a catchy tagline, implies an urgency that appears synonymous with cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, which is precisely what they do with your ailing cell phone, or any of the other electronic wizardries previously mentioned. Their franchises can be had for a modest investment of under $100,000. A German cell phone repair company and one in Australia appear to be following suit along similar lines. A smaller American company also offers cell phone repair franchises at less than $50,000, but sans an established presence in the industry, perhaps you get what you pay for. Still, in an industry with massive demand largely due to manufacturers shirking any maintenance responsibilities to those minions of communications gadgetry that they've spawned, cell phone repair franchising opportunities aren't yet ubiquitous, and that is surprising, akin to a transistor radio cradled to a boy's ear in the shower a generation or more ago, perhaps even shocking.
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