The legacy of Creamery Tire Inc. begins in a home garage with tires stored inside and friends’ and family members’ tires serviced outside. Fast forward 35 years, and today, the company is using robots to change tires.
“We’re kind of techie, but we’re not normally early adopters,” says owner Jim Shainline. “I would say this is the first thing that we went all out and said, ‘We want to get in on the ground floor.’”
Before there were robots, Creamery Tire started with family.
Like so many other second-generation tire dealers, Jim says he grew up watching his dad in the business. Dick Shainline was first a tire wholesaler and his youngest son remembers being six or seven years old and riding along with his dad delivering tires in the 1970s.
By the mid-80s, the elder Shainline wanted to transition into retail and he started with that shop at home. Creamery Tire, in Creamery, Pa., got its official start in 1988.
Dick Shainline’s older son, Rich, joined him and eventually the duo outgrew their shop space at home. In 1993, they acquired property and built a store — Creamery Tire moved to Creamery Road in Creamery, Pa.
As the business continued to grow, Jim joined his brother and dad at work. On two separate occasions, they doubled the size of the Creamery Road location and for a couple of years were selling 70,000 to 80,000 tires from that store.
After their dad retired, the Shainline brothers decided to expand their ownership circle to include a pair of key employees: Joe Franklin and Tom Rambo. And as time went on, they added three more stores, in Chalfont, East Norriton and Phoenixville. All are located north of Philadelphia.
Closure in the face of shortage
Expansion has been a goal, but also a slow process. Jim Shainline says in 2019, the company was finalizing deals to add both the East Norriton and Phoenixville locations. “Then of course, 2020 hit and everything stopped.”
It was anything but an ideal time to open additional storefronts, but he says the company had already made deals and had begun work on the buildings. “At that point, there was no way to back out of them. So we just went forward.”
The Phoenixville location opened in August 2020, while the East Norriton store opened in May 2021. “But our East Norriton location definitely picked up quicker,” he says.
As time went on, staffing pressures worsened and Jim says the company realized “we don’t have enough people (to keep all four stores open.)”
They could have shuffled some personnel between stores, but customer demand at the Creamery, Chalfont and East Norriton locations remained steady and the team decided it didn’t make sense to complicate those stores’ operations by cutting staff.
So about a year ago, Creamery Tire closed the doors of its Phoenixville location. The company moved the staff that did remain there to its other stores to help share the workload in the busier locations.
“(Phoenixville) was doing well, it wasn’t as busy as the other locations. So it made more sense for the couple of people that we still had there to spread them out to the other locations. We didn’t actually lose any employees. We just had to incorporate them into (the other locations.)”
The company still lists the Phoenixville store on its website, but notes it is “temporarily closed.”
Jim says, “Unfortunately, I don’t have any expectations right now (of when it might reopen.) It’s still to be determined. We’re seeking (employees) every day. I have someone who’s actually doing recruiting for me. We’re trying to keep our other locations fully staffed.
“There’s always a need for tire techs. That’s our main thing — getting people to actually change tires. That’s all that we do is tires. I don’t do any mechanical work or anything like that. It’s hard to find people who want to bust tires all day. We’re always looking for that.
“I probably need five more people and I could get that location open, but we need to find five of the right people to do it.”
The search for those who want to do manual labor in a hot and humid tire dealership in the summer is especially difficult. Jim says he hears it from other business owners, too, who need people to do physical jobs.
“We’re trying to get people who don’t mind going out there and sweating for eight or nine hours a day. It’s definitely not easy work.”
Turning to robotic technology
The search for employees — and especially the need for employees who can physically lift and handle tires all day long — brings us back to robots.
“That’s one of the reasons we started this whole thing with RoboTire,” a Detroit, Mich.-based company that claims its automated tire installation machine can bolt on four tires in less than 20 minutes.
“I can have that robot change tires with one person running an entire bay,” rather than Creamery Tire’s typical strategy, which is to assign two tire technicians to each vehicle. “If I can have one guy run a full bay and do tires where I normally would need two to three guys, that helps with my labor shortage a lot.”
Jim Shainline says the RoboTire system at Creamery Tire is the first one that is “fully integrated with the tire changers and balancers.”
Discount Tire, which has invested in RoboTire, has installed the system at stores in Arizona and Texas, but those are set up with robotic arms to “take the tires off and put the tires back on (the vehicle,)” then a technician will take the tires for the service work.
Creamery Tire’s system is all encompassing, with a tire changer and balancer from Hunter Engineering Co. built into it. Jim says the tire dealership hadn’t used Hunter equipment previously, so there was a slight adjustment to using a new brand of equipment. But “it wasn’t anything where it took a lot of training or anything like that to get used to them.
“The robot takes the tire off the car and brings it over to set it right on the tire machine to change the tire. You hit the pedal and it changes the tire for you,” he says. “You’ve got to take the old tire off, put the new tire back on,” and then after pressing the pedal, “it mounts it back up for you and then the robot takes the tire off the tire changer (and) puts it on the balancer. You spin it. You put the weights on it. The robot comes over, pulls it off the balancer and puts it back on the car.
“It does all the lifting. It takes all the grunt part out of it, so the technician doesn’t have to spend all that energy.”
He says most of the tire technicians he hires are in their 20s and have the energy and stamina required to change multiple tires a day. “By the time somebody is in their 30s and 40s, it’s tough to get down and change tires. It takes a toll on you.”
Jim Shainline says he’s 53 “and I can work on it all day and not even get tired. It takes that much of the physical effort out of changing the tires.”
Creamery Tire talked with RoboTire officials for more than two years before ultimately purchasing their robotic system. It was installed at the company’s largest and busiest store, in Creamery, the week before Christmas 2022.
And because the technology is so new, the tire dealership knew its investment came with a role to play in the research and development phase. Just like the installments at Discount Tire helped RoboTire work out glitches with the robotic arms, Jim says Creamery Tire is ready to help with the integrations of the tire machines and balancer.
“It wasn’t an impulsive thing. It was a good two to two-and-a-half years of conversation back and forth with (RoboTire). We really think we can make this work. With all the AI (artificial intelligence) stuff going on with driverless cars, this is the way that everything’s going to go — more computer-oriented and robotics-oriented. We thought it would be kind of neat to get on the ground floor of this and help somebody design a system.”
And so far, the RoboTire system is living up to expectations.
Jim says not every technician has been trained on how to manage the system yet, so that stands in the way of it being used non-stop, every day, at Creamery Tire.
“We try to use it at least a few times every day. It’s not as fast as doing it the conventional way. They say that it will change four tires in 20 minutes and it may get there. It’s not quite there yet. There’s still some work that needs to be done on it. One guy can change four tires in 30 minutes with very little effort.”
That time is improving, he says. RoboTire has made updates to software and adjustments to the robot’s movements throughout the process, and as a result, installation time “has definitely decreased by a good 15 minutes.”
Jim says even if RoboTire doesn’t hit its stated goal of four tires in 20 minutes, he thinks eight tires in 60 minutes puts Creamery Tire in a good position.
“If I can, with one guy, turn two cars an hour, I’d be happy with that,” he says. “Your best tire technician might be able to change four tires, depending on what kind of car it is, in 30 minutes. But he’s not going to do that all day.
“For the first two, three or four cars, he could probably keep that speed going, but after six or seven hours, you’re not going to be able to do that all day, whereas the robot is going to be able to consistently do that all day, every day. The hardest part (for the technician) is walking back and forth from one side (of the vehicle) to the other.”
Two big questions when automating tasks like those performed by trained tire technicians center around what those employees think of the system and if they consider it a threat to their livelihoods.
Jim says the reaction from his employees has been mostly positive.
In the beginning, there was some trepidation, with employees thinking, “’They’re going to replace us with robots,’” he says. “But we quelled that pretty quickly. We’re not doing this to replace anybody. We still need people to run the robot. We’re still going to need people in the other bays.
“We’re not going to set all of our bays up with robots. We knew that wasn’t going to happen. Once (the system) got here and they actually saw how it worked, they realized this isn’t replacing anybody.”
