The Next Chapter: Skilled hands and fading trades

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 24, 2026

By Ruby E. Carlino

I grew up on a tropical island roughly the size of Nantucket. The island I lived on was serviced by a regular ferry and outrigger boats. The nearest big city was on another island about an hour away by ferry and another three or four hours by bus or car.

There was active inter-island trade, and the town where I grew up, one of the three on the island, was the center of commerce. We could buy school supplies in the same store that sold lumber and fishing nets.

There was a preschool run by Catholic nuns. All our school uniforms were made by local dressmakers and tailors. Our non-school clothes were custom made by the same dressmakers and tailors. Old clothes were altered to fit as needed, shoes were sent to the cobblers, furniture was reupholstered by local workers, and television, well, we did not have repair technicians because no one on the island had a television set.

If you wanted other choices, you would have to travel to the big city for half a day to buy clothes off the rack, or new shoes, or whatever else you thought you needed. That seemed like a very long trip, one that we mercifully did not have to make more than once a year.

Once I moved to the big city, the handwork and repair trades were the same. Sandals and shoes were repaired by the nearby cobbler. There was a knife sharpener guy, and a shop for watch and clock repairs. Clothes were still custom made for the most part but by then mass produced clothes were beginning to become available at the local malls.

My wedding dress was custom made by a local bridal dressmaker. When I moved overseas, I found that a seamstress in El Salvador could be hired by the day to make clothes, curtains, bedcovers, and whatever else you could think of. In Turkey, rugs were made and repaired by hand. Some of those skills took years to perfect.

Somewhere along the way, the world changed. The skilled hands did not suddenly become less skilled. The economics around them changed. Now, mass-produced goods often are cheap and can be replaced easily. Many household goods are moving toward planned obsolescence. A television for instance is no longer something routinely repaired and kept alive for decades, but a product expected to serve its term and then be replaced.

Recently, when the television in our living room conked out, I had a TV repair person come look at it. It could not be repaired and needed to be replaced. It has become uncommon to find a “dumb” TV, which is what I really wanted. What I got was a Smart TV that asks to be updated regularly, not only in its software, its apps, its privacy permissions, its user agreements, but sometimes even in the terms on which it watches us watch it.

In six or seven years when it gets “old” we may get an AI-TV that will be able to turn itself on and may never shut up. When that TV reaches its planned obsolescence window, perhaps it could walk itself to the landfill and self destruct. No one will want to become skilled at repairing a product that will be obsolete in less than 10 years

The reality is that handwoven ponchos cannot compete with factory produced ponchos made overseas. Handmade rugs cannot quite compete in price with washable machine made rugs selling for $19.99 at the local store. A television with a planned obsolescence window does not need a repair person, it needs a salesperson to sell you the next bigger and smarter TV.

What has changed is not only the way a product is made and its durability, but our personal relationships to those material objects. Handmade items and repair trades continue to exist. In parts of the world where possessions are expensive relative to income, things are often made to last, tied to human skill, and worth maintaining over time. But as goods become cheaper to make and more disposable, the hand crafters and repair people become less necessary to the daily lives of most of us.

Projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest a continued decline in some familiar skilled trades and repair occupations. They are part of a vanishing world in which work by hand was once depended on. When these hands are gone, will anyone miss them?

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A Sequim resident since 2018, Ruby E. Carlino has lived in different parts of the world and is now at home in the garden, rain or shine. She can be reached at nextchaptercolumn@proton.me.