Mom-and-pop shop near Pittsburgh keeps appliances chugging along

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 age 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 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 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 such big-box stores such as Lowe's, Home Depot and hhgregg, they said.

"We've had some of the same customers for 50 years," Vinski-Fischer said.

In Etna, the shop is among a small group of businesses that have kept the doors open for decades. Vinski Brothers is still operated out of a century-old, three-story home originally purchased by Vinski-Fischer's grandmother, Anna Vinski. Her husband, Joseph, worked at the Isabella furnace.

The family has added several rooms over the years and maintains a warehouse that runs the length of the building. The store was established by George Vinski and his two brothers just after World War II. He had served as a chief electrician mate in the U.S. Navy. Before the war, he and his brothers had built and sold radios out of the home. In the early 1950s, the shop added TVs, which were becoming all the rage.

Eventually George Vinski's brothers went on to other pursuits, leaving him and his wife, Mary, to run the business.

"This has always been a small operation," Vinski-Fischer said. She and her ­husband employ two delivery men.

These days, Fischer said, much of the shop's core business is appliance installations, upgrades and repairs. Towns like the now-booming Lawrenceville just across the Allegheny River, which have older homes that are getting remodeled and sold, keep the shop busy.

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.

Vinski Brothers relies, in part, on people who want to hang onto the things they bought years ago.