It is enough to read the economic section of any daily national or local newspaper, or listen to one of the many television or radio newscasts to understand how contradictory the news is regarding the economic downturn that hit (and is hitting) all of the countries in the world.
In regards to Italy, there are those who talk about a very negative moment that is already behind us and those who warn us that the worst is yet to come; there are those that say that they can start to catch a glimpse of calmness and those that show us that hundreds of thousands of people are destined to lose their jobs; there are small and big businesses that collapse in difficulty and others that seem to not have had problems at all.

To us, this seemed like the right moment to try and understand how much the independent auto repair industry has been hit by the economy, how much they have been struggling, and which after-effect they left.

To have a clear picture that is as real as possible, we aren't obligated to listen to some wisecrack remarks from occasional "bar meetings". Instead, we entered by telephone in many workshops small and large, to listen to the live voices of whom, from the other end of the line, told us about the current situation, and explained to us how they are living in this particular moment. This is how we established Zago Info "Tell me about yourself" interviews; we aimed a series of questions to a highly-represented set of auto repairers and then collected their answers. Here are the results of our work.