Alma Service Company Offers Extensive Repair Service

From The American Horologist and Jeweler magazine, July, 1946

Alma Service Company Offers Extensive Repair Service

One of the greatest worries of a busy jeweler is piled up repair jobs waiting to be done. Naturally, he wants to accommodate his customers, but not by cutting in on the valuable time he should devote to making sales.

Al B. Greenberg, manager of a jewelry chain, recognized the great need for an outfit that could competently handle all a jeweler's repair jobs for him - yet leave him plenty of room for profit on these jobs. In March of 1944, he set up a "jeweler's service station" in a loft on the Bowery in lower New York. Starting with three employees, today he has twenty-four repair experts working continuously on the many common and unusual repair jobs that come into his shop. On his staff are six skilled watchmakers-trained in Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Switzerland and America, a diamond setter, a hammer setter, two jewelers and an engraver, besides a plater, polisher, and silversmith. In his office, Mr. Greenberg employs two secretaries, a shipping clerk, and three runners, whose job it is to go around the city seeking hard to get materials.

In addition to the usual watch repair work, the firm handles many unusual jobs, ranging from repair jobs on electric percolators and silverware to those on valuable antiques and perhaps a $40,000 diamond bracelet.

Alma boasts that nothing is impossible, and will undertake to repair anything, large or small. This often results in a greater expenditure of time and work-particularly in locating rare and hard-to-find parts than they can logically charge for the job in question. But Mr. Greenberg has found that it pays out in customer confidence that Alma can indeed do anything.