In the bike business (and many others), there are middlemen in between the middlemen! Between me and a bike brand would often be a distributor and in between me

In the bike business (and many others), there are middlemen in between the middlemen! Between me and a bike brand would often be a distributor and in between me and the distributor was a sales rep! I found my sales reps (who took 1-4 points off the margin) to be generally likeable and altogether useless. But there they were, a relic of bike retail of old, still hanging on. And that's the view of more than a few consumers in terms of how they view their bike shop. Anything that can be sold direct, will be.