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> The novice and intermediate cyclist need local bike shops to do maintenance on their bikes at affordable rates. The local bike shops need a revenue stream bey

> The novice and intermediate cyclist need local bike shops to do maintenance on their bikes at affordable rates. The local bike shops need a revenue stream beyond labor for maintenance to be affordable. I don’t agree with this reasoning. Why wouldn’t maintenance be priced at the true rate? In what way is it better for consumers to overpay for their equipment in order to underpay for maintenance?

ljf 5y ago
I didn't read it to say that, just that it is very hard to be a mechanic only shop - they also need to sell something else to be a profitable business. In London there a few mechanics/coffee shops that stayed profitable that way. If more people cycled I'm sure you would see more 'just mechanics' but in most places they can't afford to be that.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  An acquaintance of mine tried to do the cafe/sales/repair thing [1]; he went more high end on all three, selling fancy drinks, pricey Dutch cargo bikes, etc. It didn't work out. I think they lasted ~3 years, though it was clear by the end that the writing was on the wall. [1]: https://twitter.com/berlinbikecafe https://twitter.com/berlinbikecafe
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > he went more high end on all three Maybe that was the problem there?
    - JCharante 5y ago
      Yeah high-end cafe seems like a tough sell. A cheap cafe to go to during group rides sounds great for having people learn about your high end service shop.
      - mikepurvis 5y ago
        I feel like high end bike service in general is a tough sell unless you have a huge local club-ride community of people whose time is extremely valuable. I know someone who operated a Velofix van for a few years, and I used it a few times, but the minimum cost was basically $100+. For that much coin, I would just walk my bike home or take it on the bus. Particularly if it was something like a flat tire where I know I can fix it myself at home for a few dollars.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      Possibly, but it was also not a large storefront, and it's been replaced by a boutique donut shop. It's down the street from a creperie, a wine bar, and some other bistro thing. There used to be a health food store on this block. Basically just saying that some combination of floor space, rent and other fixed costs, etc etc led to pursuing a higher-end business model and it didn't work out. There may be lots of reasons for that, but one of the principles here is that you need to be able to bike to your bike store— it's not fulfilling its purpose if it's in a power center plaza that you need to drive to.
  - jamincan 5y ago
    I'm not exactly sure why Berlin Bike Cafe didn't really work out in the end. I do think KW is very well served by existing bike shops, and while Graham focused on a market segment that isn't well-represented by incumbents, it meant that he needed time for it to grow as well. London Bike Cafe seems to be chugging along quite nicely on a similar model, so it doesn't seem like it was an entirely hopeless endeavour on the face of it.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    Berlin is the wrong place for that. Even in tech salaries are often in the EUR45k range gross, and with mandatory medical insurance at EUR400/m, rent at probably EUR800/m and still taxes it doesn't leave much for expensive bicycles. Cheap bicycles plus good mid-priced service is where it's at. Of course, that's hard, dirty, skilled work.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      Note that this is Berlin as in the pre-WWII name of Kitchener, Canada, not the Berlin in Germany.
      - snovv_crash 5y ago
        Ah, I saw a similar setup in Berlin, Germany at a location which has now been replaced by Rose Bikes, and the cafe seems to be gone.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Bikes are pretty low maintenance, the repairs are usually fairly simple, and the parts are cheap. It's hard to make margins on a low price low volume service. If a bike is really damaged it usually makes more sense to just replace it wholesale. If e-bikes take off they could help. There are a lot more moving parts to break and especially electrical issues to track down. Electrical issues are real moneymakers in diagnostic fees on cars.
  - Matthias247 5y ago
    I think you might underestimate the higher end bike market. Parts are often higher priced than what lots of people pay for complete bikes (e.g. a set of disc brakes 400$, a MTB fork 1000$, a groupset 1000$, a wheelset 800$, a dropper post 300$, etc). And the associated repairs like a brake bleed, a shock service or a wheel rebuild might take time and will have a high cost too. You don't have to look into ebikes. On Mountainbikes that are used as intended parts break often enough to keep mechanics busy. Ebikes might however indeed bring the higher priced bikes to a higher amount of people.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      High end bikes are a tiny sliver of an already small market.
      - aix1 5y ago
        And also, while a groupset might indeed cost $1000, what sort of circumstances might require one to replace the entire groupset? (We're talking repairs rather than upgrades.)
        snovv_crash 5y ago
        Riding 50k km on dust/gravel roads, and the frame and wheels will still be good but chain and groupset will be significantly worn.
        5y ago
hinkley 5y ago
The mechanics end up helping pay for the building and profit margin, same as everything else in the shop. There’s a price point where you can keep your mechanics running at 90% every day, and that may or may not pay for the building.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I see this as the major issue. Any business has to pay the commercial landlord. That rent seeking behaviour is a huge tax to place on a business. The only way I would operate a shopfront business of any kind is if I owned the building. But I'd need to build a business first that could pay for the building. If I can build such a business, then I likely wouldn't bother with the shopfront until you get "Apple" big.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    You lose about half of your customers when you move to a new building and the landlords know it. Big companies and churches play this right. They buy more land then they need, and when the market is down they buy more, and when they have too much they rent it out a few years at a time so they never have to wait long to expand.
notriddle 5y ago
It’s not that simple. If you own a brick-and-mortar store of any kind, there are a lot of costs other than labor and parts, like the building itself, marketing, security, and attending the desk or phone. A lot of these costs won’t go down if the store stops selling new bikes; they’re flat, or there’s some minimum amount that you can possibly buy.
jandrese 5y ago
I have a local bike shop that I would like to support, but they stock only the cheapest no-name parts and charge way more than the premium parts on Amazon. I went to get a replacement inner tube--nothing special, just a 26x1.95 with a Schrader valve--and all they had was some Chinese brand (Hilong or something like that?) for $35. I want to support local businesses, but come on. The only thing they offered over Amazon is that they would install it for you for a modest $50 in labor. They also basically don't stock anything under $800 if you are looking to buy a bike, and even those are Giant brand mountain bikes with trash tier hardware. I went looking for something I could commute to work on every day and they were trying to sell so much fragile carbon fiber stuff that was miles outside of my budget range. I don't need to shave 5/10ths off of my commute, I want low maintenance, comfort, and ruggedness. Apparently that's totally uncool and biking is all about ultralight and ultrahard--feel every crack in the pavement through the hard plastic saddle! I wasn't impressed with the line about "it's more comfortable because you use less energy to get there".
- ShroudedNight 5y ago
  > it's more comfortable because you use less energy to get there I wonder if these people are internally consistent enough to eschew the use of ramps or pulleys.
- JCharante 5y ago
  It sounds like a local bike shop isn't really what you're looking for. Under $800 a Decathlon/triban road bike is pretty decent. There are commuter bikes for $100 but it's just not worth servicing them because telling someone it'll be 40% of the original bike price in labor + parts to fix something not major is hard for them to accept. > low maintenance, comfort, and ruggedness. Apparently that's totally uncool and biking is all about ultralight and ultrahard--feel every crack in the pavement through the hard plastic saddle! Carbon is more comfortable by reducing the vibrations that you'll feel compared to aluminum. The reason why they stock shitty parts is because they appear to service really cheap bikes and for people who buy cheap bikes, that's what they want. I know many shops who wouldn't service cheap bikes and I know many shops where they would but I wouldn't trust them with my more expensive Trek road bike. So it's strange that they also stock carbon frames.
scoofy 5y ago
The reason is that the price elasticity of demand for bikes, outside of, say, the netherlands, is extremely elastic. Your counter-argument presumes that cycling can't just fail, that the prices are inelastic enough to support mechanic-only shops. I truly believe that cycling, as an activity, can just fail and cease to exist. It has ceased to exist in many areas in America. Many, many, many novice cyclists would rather abandon cycling than pay a large premium on bicycle maintenance. Perhaps there is a different business model that would work, but I see the large manufacturers as having in interest in creating an environment where maintenance service can be delivered at-cost.
burnished 5y ago
What is the "true rate"? You could say it's whatever you need to charge to keep the lights on and rent paid based on however many hours a week you expect to be performing maintenance. You could say it's what people feel is fair for skilled labor. You could say it's what people historically pay for the service. But we are talking about bike shops going from selling things and selling services to just selling services, so it's really what you need to charge per hour to keep the lights on. So if the "true" rate ends up being more than the market will bear, and you dont have alternate income, you close down. So it isn't really a situation where one thing had an artificially inflated price and the other an artificially deflated price, more like the way bike shops as we know them work is to have diverse income streams, and removing an important one means that the business model as we understand it ceases to function.

ljf 5y ago

I didn't read it to say that, just that it is very hard to be a mechanic only shop - they also need to sell something else to be a profitable business. In London there a few mechanics/coffee shops that stayed profitable that way. If more people cycled I'm sure you would see more 'just mechanics' but in most places they can't afford to be that.

mikepurvis 5y ago
An acquaintance of mine tried to do the cafe/sales/repair thing [1]; he went more high end on all three, selling fancy drinks, pricey Dutch cargo bikes, etc. It didn't work out. I think they lasted ~3 years, though it was clear by the end that the writing was on the wall. [1]: https://twitter.com/berlinbikecafe https://twitter.com/berlinbikecafe
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > he went more high end on all three Maybe that was the problem there?
  - JCharante 5y ago
    Yeah high-end cafe seems like a tough sell. A cheap cafe to go to during group rides sounds great for having people learn about your high end service shop.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      I feel like high end bike service in general is a tough sell unless you have a huge local club-ride community of people whose time is extremely valuable. I know someone who operated a Velofix van for a few years, and I used it a few times, but the minimum cost was basically $100+. For that much coin, I would just walk my bike home or take it on the bus. Particularly if it was something like a flat tire where I know I can fix it myself at home for a few dollars.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Possibly, but it was also not a large storefront, and it's been replaced by a boutique donut shop. It's down the street from a creperie, a wine bar, and some other bistro thing. There used to be a health food store on this block. Basically just saying that some combination of floor space, rent and other fixed costs, etc etc led to pursuing a higher-end business model and it didn't work out. There may be lots of reasons for that, but one of the principles here is that you need to be able to bike to your bike store— it's not fulfilling its purpose if it's in a power center plaza that you need to drive to.
- jamincan 5y ago
  I'm not exactly sure why Berlin Bike Cafe didn't really work out in the end. I do think KW is very well served by existing bike shops, and while Graham focused on a market segment that isn't well-represented by incumbents, it meant that he needed time for it to grow as well. London Bike Cafe seems to be chugging along quite nicely on a similar model, so it doesn't seem like it was an entirely hopeless endeavour on the face of it.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  Berlin is the wrong place for that. Even in tech salaries are often in the EUR45k range gross, and with mandatory medical insurance at EUR400/m, rent at probably EUR800/m and still taxes it doesn't leave much for expensive bicycles. Cheap bicycles plus good mid-priced service is where it's at. Of course, that's hard, dirty, skilled work.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Note that this is Berlin as in the pre-WWII name of Kitchener, Canada, not the Berlin in Germany.
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      Ah, I saw a similar setup in Berlin, Germany at a location which has now been replaced by Rose Bikes, and the cafe seems to be gone.
jandrese 5y ago
Bikes are pretty low maintenance, the repairs are usually fairly simple, and the parts are cheap. It's hard to make margins on a low price low volume service. If a bike is really damaged it usually makes more sense to just replace it wholesale. If e-bikes take off they could help. There are a lot more moving parts to break and especially electrical issues to track down. Electrical issues are real moneymakers in diagnostic fees on cars.
- Matthias247 5y ago
  I think you might underestimate the higher end bike market. Parts are often higher priced than what lots of people pay for complete bikes (e.g. a set of disc brakes 400$, a MTB fork 1000$, a groupset 1000$, a wheelset 800$, a dropper post 300$, etc). And the associated repairs like a brake bleed, a shock service or a wheel rebuild might take time and will have a high cost too. You don't have to look into ebikes. On Mountainbikes that are used as intended parts break often enough to keep mechanics busy. Ebikes might however indeed bring the higher priced bikes to a higher amount of people.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    High end bikes are a tiny sliver of an already small market.
    - aix1 5y ago
      And also, while a groupset might indeed cost $1000, what sort of circumstances might require one to replace the entire groupset? (We're talking repairs rather than upgrades.)
      - snovv_crash 5y ago
        Riding 50k km on dust/gravel roads, and the frame and wheels will still be good but chain and groupset will be significantly worn.
        5y ago

hinkley 5y ago

The mechanics end up helping pay for the building and profit margin, same as everything else in the shop. There’s a price point where you can keep your mechanics running at 90% every day, and that may or may not pay for the building.

_carbyau_ 5y ago
I see this as the major issue. Any business has to pay the commercial landlord. That rent seeking behaviour is a huge tax to place on a business. The only way I would operate a shopfront business of any kind is if I owned the building. But I'd need to build a business first that could pay for the building. If I can build such a business, then I likely wouldn't bother with the shopfront until you get "Apple" big.
- hinkley 5y ago
  You lose about half of your customers when you move to a new building and the landlords know it. Big companies and churches play this right. They buy more land then they need, and when the market is down they buy more, and when they have too much they rent it out a few years at a time so they never have to wait long to expand.

notriddle 5y ago

It’s not that simple. If you own a brick-and-mortar store of any kind, there are a lot of costs other than labor and parts, like the building itself, marketing, security, and attending the desk or phone. A lot of these costs won’t go down if the store stops selling new bikes; they’re flat, or there’s some minimum amount that you can possibly buy.

jandrese 5y ago

I have a local bike shop that I would like to support, but they stock only the cheapest no-name parts and charge way more than the premium parts on Amazon. I went to get a replacement inner tube--nothing special, just a 26x1.95 with a Schrader valve--and all they had was some Chinese brand (Hilong or something like that?) for $35. I want to support local businesses, but come on. The only thing they offered over Amazon is that they would install it for you for a modest $50 in labor. They also basically don't stock anything under $800 if you are looking to buy a bike, and even those are Giant brand mountain bikes with trash tier hardware. I went looking for something I could commute to work on every day and they were trying to sell so much fragile carbon fiber stuff that was miles outside of my budget range. I don't need to shave 5/10ths off of my commute, I want low maintenance, comfort, and ruggedness. Apparently that's totally uncool and biking is all about ultralight and ultrahard--feel every crack in the pavement through the hard plastic saddle! I wasn't impressed with the line about "it's more comfortable because you use less energy to get there".

ShroudedNight 5y ago
> it's more comfortable because you use less energy to get there I wonder if these people are internally consistent enough to eschew the use of ramps or pulleys.
JCharante 5y ago
It sounds like a local bike shop isn't really what you're looking for. Under $800 a Decathlon/triban road bike is pretty decent. There are commuter bikes for $100 but it's just not worth servicing them because telling someone it'll be 40% of the original bike price in labor + parts to fix something not major is hard for them to accept. > low maintenance, comfort, and ruggedness. Apparently that's totally uncool and biking is all about ultralight and ultrahard--feel every crack in the pavement through the hard plastic saddle! Carbon is more comfortable by reducing the vibrations that you'll feel compared to aluminum. The reason why they stock shitty parts is because they appear to service really cheap bikes and for people who buy cheap bikes, that's what they want. I know many shops who wouldn't service cheap bikes and I know many shops where they would but I wouldn't trust them with my more expensive Trek road bike. So it's strange that they also stock carbon frames.

scoofy 5y ago

The reason is that the price elasticity of demand for bikes, outside of, say, the netherlands, is extremely elastic. Your counter-argument presumes that cycling can't just fail, that the prices are inelastic enough to support mechanic-only shops. I truly believe that cycling, as an activity, can just fail and cease to exist. It has ceased to exist in many areas in America. Many, many, many novice cyclists would rather abandon cycling than pay a large premium on bicycle maintenance. Perhaps there is a different business model that would work, but I see the large manufacturers as having in interest in creating an environment where maintenance service can be delivered at-cost.

burnished 5y ago

What is the "true rate"? You could say it's whatever you need to charge to keep the lights on and rent paid based on however many hours a week you expect to be performing maintenance. You could say it's what people feel is fair for skilled labor. You could say it's what people historically pay for the service. But we are talking about bike shops going from selling things and selling services to just selling services, so it's really what you need to charge per hour to keep the lights on. So if the "true" rate ends up being more than the market will bear, and you dont have alternate income, you close down. So it isn't really a situation where one thing had an artificially inflated price and the other an artificially deflated price, more like the way bike shops as we know them work is to have diverse income streams, and removing an important one means that the business model as we understand it ceases to function.