Kelowna’s last bastion for jukebox and old school electronics repair

There might be a busted cassette player in the back of your closet covered in dust, or a classic arcade game with a wonky joystick and people in Kelowna who want to revive those electronics end up turning to the Grzegorzewski family business. 

Jackson Grzegorzewski and his parents own the Teltronics repair shop in Kelowna, the last general electronics repair shop in town. He said they’ll fix pretty much anything old school, arcade machines, jukeboxes, TVs, microwaves and so on. 

“Like 1940s and 50s radios and whatnot with tubes in them,” he said. “An old school gramophone, the one where you crank the handle and then it powers up a spring. We managed to do that, even though there wasn’t any electronics in there, but that was because it just needed some basic tweaking.”

He said when his family took the shop over back in 2005 there were six competitors, but he said the last competing shop closed down around four years ago. 

“We used to specialize in televisions and microwaves. We had to generalize, and the only reason why we’ve stayed open is because we take everything,” he said. “We repair things for Scandia. We do arcade machines, pianos, TVs, microwaves.”

Pretty much the only thing the shop doesn’t do is cell phones since those require a set of specific tools.

These days technology improves so quickly that by the time something breaks it can make more sense to get an upgrade. 

“Things from the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, they were all the same. They didn’t really upgrade too quickly. People had TVs from the 60s that were still working,” he said.

Grzegorzewski said that along with the rapid improvement in electronics the middle class is shrinking, and with it the middle market. 

“Companies are focusing on either the whales, the rich people, or the poor people where they’re making as much of a thing as they can as cheap as they can,” he said.

“When it comes to the whales that buy things, most of them are so rich that they don’t care if it breaks.”

He said it’s kind of the same for people with limited means.

“They buy something and it only lasts them a year or two because it’s not a quality device, and they didn’t pay too much for it, so they just toss it and buy a replacement.”

From tailors to antique watch repair and cobblers, there are others like Grzegorzewski who are pushing back against the mass production of cheap stuff. 

“You get what you pay for is still very true in electronics,” he said. “You buy a cheap product, you get cheap quality.”