ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 24, 1997 TAG: 9703240103
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND>
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
The all-male bastion has given way. With 65 percent of their customers women, few car-parts makers want to offend.
Butch Hoffmann opens the door of his repair shop, walks past the oily hoists and red tool chests and shows off a bit of endangered Americana - an auto parts calendar featuring sultry, nearly naked models.
For years, the calendars have been as much a part of service stations as wrenches.
``When you walk through the shop and see something gracious like that, it gives you a nice thought and you go about your business,'' said Hoffmann, owner of Forest Hill Garage in Richmond.
But times have changed.
Shamed by bad publicity and worried about offending increasingly powerful female customers, most car-parts and tool manufacturers have stopped distributing the cheesecake calendars.
``The reason is real simple: In today's marketplace, you can't afford to alienate any customer,'' said Scott Ginsburg, director of advertising for Raleigh N.C.-based General Parts Inc., a member company of national tool and parts distributor Carquest. General Parts discontinued its swimsuit calendar, called ``Mermaids,'' about five years ago.
``We recognized that the industry was changing and that our customers were changing,'' said Richard Secor, a spokesman for Snap-on Tools of Kenosha, Wis. Snap-on dropped its girlie calendar in 1994.
This year will be the first without two staples of a mechanic's life, the bikini calendar and ``Parts Pups'' magazine given out by NAPA parts dealers. The magazine titillated mechanics with photos of women in swimsuits and amused them with short stories and jokes.
NAPA's new publications are a little drier - focusing on new tools and the proper way to change transmission fluid.
Bernard Beck, an associate professor of sociology at Chicago's Northwestern University, said the calendars are vestiges of a time when garages were male sanctuaries. Most of the customers were men, and they felt comfortable with the calendars and greasy mechanics.
Now about 65 percent of service station customers are women and 6,000 of the more than 750,000 mechanics nationwide are female, said Richard White of the National Institute for Auto Service Excellence.
Cathy Reichow, who owns DanR's Sales and Service in Toledo, Ohio, said about one-third of her customers are women, and they would never walk into a garage plastered with posters of nearly naked pinups.
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS. Butch Hoffmann owns one of the fewby CNBrepair shops that still uses near-naked models to display the date.