If I recall correctly, Specialized Bikes pulled all their products from Amazon a while ago, pointing to the failing local bike shops eventually hurting the bike business for everyone.
Bicycles are not toys. They are vehicles that need maintenance. You can do much of that maintenance yourself if you're a nerd, but the vast majority of cyclists are dependent on local bike shops to sustain the cycling community.
The bicycle/parts manufacturers need a large cycling community to sell products to. The large cycling community will have novice and intermediate cyclists that will abandon cycling if their bikes break down. 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. Thus, the major bicycle manufacturers need to give a oligopoly status to the local bike shops in order to keep their user base large.
As a life long cyclist, I've seen the industry grow and wane, and throughout it all, I've seen the vast majority of people think bicycles are some type of sports-equipment. Decisions like this are one of only a few business models that I can see sustaining the community. I'm actually surprised and optimistic to see the major manufacturer Trek start building their own brick and mortar shops in certain major cities, though I'd prefer to see this happen through a major cooperative between the various brands. If you care about making cycling a serious, sustainable transit alternative, we need to maintain the entire ecosystem of ridership, which means the race to the bottom on amazon must be stopped.
Funny that Specialized are worried about local bike shops given their track record. Want to stock Specialized bikes? They'll try and strong-arm you to dedicate the majority of your floor-space to selling other Specialized components, removing options for the existing customers of the shop.
Named your small bike shop after a famous bicycle race and French town (roubaix)? Specialized will try and sue you because they have a model of bike with the same name (and don't even own the trademark).
https://capovelo.com/Specialized-Threatening-to-Sue-Bike-Sho...
> Funny that Specialized are worried about local bike shops given their track record. Want to stock Specialized bikes? They'll try and strong-arm you to dedicate the majority of your floor-space to selling other Specialized components, removing options for the existing customers of the shop.
Exactly the same as trek and giant will do. There's a whole other game involved when dealing with the top 5 consumer brands of $1000+ bike, as a local bike shop.
I mean, the idea that Specialized isn't moving toward the apple store-style model that Trek seems to be moving toward is honestly an act of good will. Dumb lawsuits aside, specialized is one of the best brands out there, and they absolutely have the power to ask for concessions. They're running a business selling absurdly high-end bikes. They're not bikesdirect selling baseline products.
Specialized have had their own "concept stores" for years now, Trek are merely copying that idea.
As someone who has worked in multiple bike shops, and also broken their own Specialized bike and had to deal with their warranty department, I'm never giving them any of my money again.
I was told the chainstay of a Specialized Enduro was not covered under their 5 year frame warranty, as they class it as a suspension component, despite even their technical description listing it as part of the frame.
Trek replaced a hardtail xc mtb frame that cracked at the bottom bracket/chainstay interface with the next model up in the series. Was quite a painless process with the dealer.
Huh... so it seems. It appears that they only really exist in the UK, which is odd seeing as Specialized is based in the Bay Area. I see there are two locations in the Los Angeles area.
I thought the UK was big into competitive bike culture, what with having big champs like Cavendish and Froome, the Ineos Grenadiers being based there too, as a really successful team.
This seems a very strange observation to make about London. It actually has the lowest rate of car ownership of the cities in the UK.
In my experience the primary mode of travel is public transport (or it was before Covid-19 at any rate), with people occasionally using their cars for trips outside London and perhaps larger shopping trips. Though this clearly varies by Burrough, with those on the outskirts of Greater London being more car focused than those near the centre.
Ireland checking in: if you go outside of Dublin, most people own cars and use them as their main mode of travel.
A recent post on Reddit /r/AskUK came from an American who was astounded that someone would be given directions to a location and told "it's about a 30 minutes walk". They asked if British people really walked "that much". A redditor responded with Bill Bryson's piece about Americans and their cars, which included an anecdote about inviting his next door neighbors over to dinner, in which they drove. While Irish people certainly aren't allergic to walking considerable distances, I've seen "country people" here drive obscenely short distances. The car becomes a habit. Once you're outside the city, the car is still king, unfortunately. When I visit my family, I get a train to their nearest town, and if there's a convenient bus, I'll use it to do the last 20km. But that bus only runs every 2 hours and, stupidly, doesn't align with train times. When I'm there, my family constantly offer to drive me stupidly short distances. Occasionally I accept if it's raining or after dark, since most county roads have no foot path and are unlit. Also, because almost everybody in the country drives a car, there's a far higher percentage of idiots behind the wheel. For example, those between the ages of 17 and 21 who think that they're amazing, omniscient and indestructible, even after a few pints. In the city, many people hold off on the unnecessary expense of a car until they "need one", since rent costs a ton, and decent public transport makes a car a luxury that you don't need until you get a space-wagon with 3 child seats.
I agree with that observation; also somewhere in-between you have hobby/club cycle racing that has some popularity (Road, MTB, BMX, 4cross, CycloX etc), which are essential feeders into the national/pro/elite (my Brother is a British Cycling qualified coach/scout for BMX).
That really varies a lot by geographic location. Oxford, Cambridge (and to a lesser extent, London!) are very cycling intense places and the infrastructure is reasonable. Nothing compared to Denmark, Germany or Holland, but reasonable nevertheless.
what? They spend a crap ton on marketing and it seems to have paid off. I don't really know how their bikes are particularly that much better than other stuff out there. It's not like they make the drivetrain and carbon frames are pretty commodity at this point. Unless you buy into the layup marketing and special construction that only they can do hype.
Specialized and other major bike brands spend a lot on R&D. The reason that you can buy a reasonable quality open mold carbon frame direct from Taiwan these days (and rebrand it as “my great bike brand” before selling it on at a markup, if you want) is because the big brands have spent a lot of money developing and refining the concept over the years.
Modern bikes, with all their bells and whistles, which are light years better than their counterparts from 20 years ago, simply wouldn’t exist had this R&D not occurred.
That doesn't really explain the prices, a Specialized Turbo Kenevo SL Expert (9.6k EUR) full suspension e-mtb costs more than a Kawasaki or Yamaha 900cc naked motorcycle (~9k EUR). The top of the line S-works e-mtb is in a similar price point as the latest BMW S1000RR. It just doesn't make any sense other than greed.
Specialized worrying about small shops is certainly ironic. They definitely have been one of the players central at pushing out the small shops. They were one of the first pushing concept stores and are really squeezing the margins of small shops.
It's been an interesting observation to see how all the big brands have been massively increasing their margins through cheap manufacturing in China (a frame that costs >$4000 retail is less than $300 for those guys to get to the US) while the margins are incredibly low for the actual shops (<10% often) especially on high end bikes. I know many shops now make their primary income on bike servicing.
I think specialized avoiding amazon is more a case that they don't want to stay the big guy that can push the small shops around, instead having to deal with the 500lb gorilla that amazon is.
The next thing the industry has to do is spend some of this unprecedented COVID profit on lobbying for more bike lanes. My word. What's the point of a bike if it feels too dangerous taking it out on the roads sharing lanes with these reckless/distracted/intoxicated drivers? The auto industry lobbied for highways. It's time for the bike industry to play ball and do the same.
Bike lanes, as implemented in the US are a gift to cars and are down right dangerous. They communicate to drivers that bikes are designated to a lane when they are not. This is the style of lane than runs along the left side of the road with parking on the outside. They are designed with minimal buffer space (if any) and are right in the doorzone. What use is a bikelane that can be doored? Also, if a driver wants to make a right-hand turn, they must turn through a bikelane that is in a straight line direction. How does that make sense? We don't put our turn lanes for cars to cut across straight lanes.
Bikelanes also are mostly just there (in practice) for rideshare services and delivery services to drop off goods. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, given the problems with right turns and doorings mentioned earlier. It is problematic in name however, but because new cyclists treat them as actual bike lanes and are just gambling with the probability of eventionally getting hit.
We should have more bike infrastructure, but putting money into this garbage is a mistake.
Obviously I can't speak to your own personal experience, but I've done a surprising amount of biking on streets that have added bikes lanes, and my experience is that the bike lanes tend to improve my subjective experience of biking on those streets substantially. Many of those streets, to be fair, have bike lines that are shifted 3+ feet away from the parking lane, with stripes to indicate the door zone -- which is a huge benefit, frankly, over the streets that don't have this. Another change that I'm 100% in favor of is the removal of a traffic lane to allow this: this often enables right-turns to be explicitly marked as crossing a bike lane, and drivers tend to be more careful there (again, just my experience).
I've also biked on streets that became "super sharrow" streets: one lane striped with a giant green stripe that supposedly provides a big visual indicator that a bike can use the full lane. This was terrible.
> We should have more bike infrastructure, but putting money into this garbage is a mistake.
What bike infrastructure would you like to see, if not bike lanes?
> Many of those streets, to be fair, have bike lines that are shifted 3+ feet away from the parking lane, with stripes to indicate the door zone
That sounds pretty great. Unfortunately in my area the bike lanes are straight into the door zone (see for example https://goo.gl/maps/nMnKZEVZduEfkups8) and this seems to be the general design for bike lanes in the South Bay.
In fact, the city of Sunnyvale's own bike map [0] says to avoid the four feet door zone, yet the bike lane is less than 4 feet wide and straight in the door zone.
It's frustrating. You'd think they'd favor the safety of the unprotected squishy humans over the ones in two ton metal boxes, but it seems like the opposite most of the time.
Actually in Germany bike lanes are typically on the other side next to the sidewalk which in my experience is much more dangerous. It gives the indication to cars that bikes are more like pedestrians, they get often overlooked at intersections, dooring is an even bigger issue, because people getting out the car to the street side tend to least look back to avoid cars coming and next to the sidewalk one also has to deal with pedestrians who don't pay attention.
In my experience, the more in the way of cars you are as a cyclist the safer you are. You still need to have clear markings, but you should always be in sight of drivers IMO, as an active participant in traffic.
Bike lanes where traffic has priority when turning across are a disaster:
- Gives cyclist false sense of security, since they need to yield to vehicles turning across "their lane"
- Little notice given to drivers that they need to take care, since they have right of way
- Cyclists have to stop at every side road, which can make taking the bike path as slow as walking
Experience cyclists won't use them and novice cyclists are given an unsafe and slow route; they will drive instead. What a waste of public funds.
A better solution, as seen in NL and some parts of London, is to make the motorist give way or even remove the vehicle entrance entirely. The transport mix you get is the transport mix you build for.
> In my experience, the more in the way of cars you are as a cyclist the safer you are. You still need to have clear markings, but you should always be in sight of drivers IMO, as an active participant in traffic.
I definitely agree with you that people on bikes should be in the way of cars because that's what gives them the most visibility, but I'd disagree with the marking parts. See the commute post I have a little bit below, the only markings on that commute on streets are a few sharrows, no bike lanes at all.
What needs to happen is for bikes to be perceived as slow moving vehicles, not unlike tractors in rural areas. People overtake the tractors as soon as it's safe to do so and don't honk at them. That happens as soon as there is enough of a critical mass of people on bikes on streets.
> What bike infrastructure would you like to see, if not bike lanes?
Junctions are where drivers tend to kill cyclists, so junction improvements are far more effective than anything along the "normal" road. Bike boxes and, ideally, dedicated light phases for bikes help far more than lanes.
> dedicated light phases for bikes help far more than lanes.
We have that in SF and in the year before COVID I basically spent every morning commute berating at least one person that tried to cross in front of me on a bike-only light. It's really hard for Americans to give up the right-turn-on-red.
In NYC they just hand out tickets like candy to people who don't know that right-turn-on-red is illegal through essentially the whole city. In 2019 though I didn't see any enforcement at all of bike-protection lights and lanes.
This is the perfect use-case for cameras. Here in .nl you dont get a ticket from a police officer. The camera takes the picture and the fine is there in your mailbox the next week ;-)
In our hometown, a big project was just finished where most busy intersections were replaced with bike tunnels. It was an expensive project, but now that it's finished it saves a lot of time in the morning commute for both cyclists and drivers.
I think decreasing parking and providing a central lane for cars to pass makes a lot of sense. Segregating cycle traffic creates dangerous intersections.
Segregating cycle traffic can create dangerous intersections, but well designed intersections do not. For example, you can give the cycle lane its own light phase. There is no question that well designed segregated infrastructure is safer than no cycle infrastructure at all.
That's an example of good bike infrastructure. For the parts where bikes interact with cars on low speed streets, the streets are either narrow so that cars drive slowly, or there is another lane for cars to pass bikes easily.
Note the lack of painted lanes; bikes and cars share the street, and cars pass bikes whenever it's safe to do so. Also note that in most of these street views perspectives, you can pan the camera and see other people biking.
I get your complaints but in a lot of areas the alternative to the painted-on lane is to have no lane at all, and having the lane at least establishes a principle. I feel safer in it, and cars in my area tend to take it seriously.
I don't think there's really a solution to the turning problem, unless you're proposing tunnels at every intersection for cars/bikes. I'm hopeful that newer cars' safety features help to fight this back (I would also like people to, yknow, pay attention when driving).
My principle (especially after getting a drivers license and realizing how little visibility one actually has while driving) is to not listen to music (so I can actually hear cars etc) and to basically slow down at every interesection that has even a bit of doubt. It's annoying but at least I'm not rolling the dice on every intersection (or at least not as much)
There’s only no choice in a lot of areas if you accept as axiomatic that we must have street level parking. While that’s a framing that anti-bike advocates like, we could also decide to make driving and parking harder in order to make other, more efficient forms of transit better.
Personally I’d argue that it’s extremely odd that we dedicate so much public space for people to leave their private property laying around.
I'm for reducing the number of cars on the road, but I do think that street parking is already a pretty big step up from the alternative of like huge parking lots.
And like for deliveries... what do you want people to do? Not stop in front of the place they are delivering?
If there's an argument for it being a public space, it's also a public space for things like deliveries, dropping people off, etc. "People should be more careful" is a glib thing to say for this stuff, and I think we should make improvements to things, but if we're talking about public space, cyclists are _also_ not the only thing on the road and accomodations can be made for stuff like delivery
>And like for deliveries... what do you want people to do? Not stop in front of the place they are delivering?
When you make a delivery, do you just stop dead in the middle of the lane you were driving on?
If yes, please proceed.
If not, why not? Don't you want to stop in front of the place you are delivering to? Why do you think that it is ok to completely block bicycle lane for the same purpose, but it's not ok to block a car lane? For an extra point, assume the car lane is a single-lane one-way road, and the delivery takes 5 minutes.
Where I live, there are many "1.5 lane" roads. Roads that are both ways, but there's not _that_ much space. Sometimes people pull over. You then have to drive around people.
So, yes, you stop "in the car lane" and it affects people.
There are also times where you change lanes because of obstructions. Just like intersections, stop lights, so many things that prevent the "just speed right ahead without any concern in the world" use case.
There are safety reasons for isolating bike/pedestrian traffic. But acting like it's uniquely unfair to bikes to have any form of obstruction... this is what roads are. Shared area for movement.
Good to hear! I wonder how car drivers would react if an uber delivery guy would park a bicycle in the car lane next to a bicycle lane to make a delivery.
And while I do agree that it isn't uniquely unfair for bicycles, it seemes that when there is no isolation between a car lane and a bicycle lane, during the busy hours there is a random car, van, taxi parked every 30-50 meters. (Well, used to be, 2 years ago)
> And like for deliveries... what do you want people to do? Not stop in front of the place they are delivering?
Where do you live where the parallel parking spots in front of businesses are always open? Where I’ve lived things like UPS will just stop in the road if necessary, and other cars will go around.
Deliveries in areas without lots of parallel parking is a solved problem; we don’t need to pretend like reducing or eliminating street level parking will have unknown impacts on things like delivery vehicles.
> I get your complaints but in a lot of areas the alternative to the painted-on lane is to have no lane at all, and having the lane at least establishes a principle.
It establishes the wrong principle - it makes drivers feel entitled to exclude cyclists from the main road lanes. A bike lane that isn't wide enough, isn't adequately maintained (sweeping, filling potholes...), leads to blind corners, or just dumps you out into the main lanes at junctions, is worse than useless - it actively makes cycling more dangerous, because drivers feel no need to share the main road lanes.
> I don't think there's really a solution to the turning problem, unless you're proposing tunnels at every intersection for cars/bikes.
The solution is to have bikes be part of the main traffic stream at that point. If you have a bike box at the front of the queueing area, and ideally a bike phase on the lights, that can help a lot.
I ride in bike lanes, road sides and sometimes in the middle of the lane. When I started cycling seriously I tried to go full vehicular cycling, but a lot of the time it endangered more than it helped and made drivers angry. 10K+ miles later the one thing I’ve learned is not to be dogmatic, there is no one safest way to ride for all roads and environments. Some roads are way better with bike lanes and some bike lanes are terrible. I just do whatever seems safest.
I've ridden a similar distance and I've actively given up on ever using bike lanes except for lanes that I specifically know are properly laid out and maintained, or a handful of places that do decent lanes (the Netherlands, London post-2010). It's just far too common for a bike lane to end up being a trap, and you have no way of knowing it's going to dump you into a blind corner / high kerb / unavoidable debris / muddy field / ... until it's too late. I agree with doing what seems safest, but you simply can't trust an unknown bike lane, so using one is just too high risk.
It's a perfectly fine principle when bike lanes are universal.
In the Netherlands, for example (well, much of the Netherlands, I haven't been everywhere), the bikes are on the bike lanes, the cars are on the car lanes, and that's that. You have no motivation to go on the car lanes (except on small alleys with no lanes), since the bike lanes just get you wherever you want to go.
Yeah, that kind of lane sucks. Cities need to face it - the bike lanes need dedicated space designed in when building or upgrading a road, or you need to remove parking spaces entirely. My city (in Australia) has been doing a lot of both recently. In the inner city, nobody misses the loss of street parking up one side of major thoroughfares (you can fit a bike lane with both directions in the space on one side of the road) - it was extremely unlikely to get a park so you usually had to pay to park in an underground/multi-storey car park anyway. Removing the parking means you can have a properly separated lane (they have plastic bumper things in like 30 cm separated double lines, painted green so it’s obvious what it is and that you can’t legally pull into it or park over it) and it’s great. They’ve even put push buttons to signal you’re there for the traffic lights.
I assume this is Sydney? I love the work the council have done to the CBD recently - I wish they'd emulate what they did to George St all over the city centre.
No, Brisbane actually, but I have heard some good things about Sydney's from a cycling group that reports on things happening locally but every week mentions a project from elsewhere in the country (Space for Cycling Brisbane).
These are some of the fist ones through the CBD - https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/traffic-and-transport/roads-... - As part of this they closed a major bridge in the middle of the city (Victoria Bridge over to South Bank) to road traffic. Before it was two bus-only lanes and two car lanes, but now it's three bus lanes and a separated bikeway.
They're also building four bridges over the river dedicated to cycle and pedestrian to link up different bike routes, and the State Government has been doing some good work with their 'Veloway' next to the M3 highway. A lot of intersection and road upgrades (and new roads) are starting to add separated bike paths too, like the overhauled Kingsford Smith Drive that finished recently.
This echoes a lot of my feelings about bike lanes, do you have any references to traffic studies or the like showing that these kinds of lanes are, indeed, more dangerous?
I'd be especially curious to know what the good alternatives are.
IIRC physical dividers like reflector poles actually do make bike lanes safer, and sharrows are mixed on whether or not they make lanes more effective.
Here's a video that illustrates my point better than what I commented, and there are some studies cited in the description which validate my admittedly anecdotal experience.
THIS ^^^. My two-cents: 90% of recent "bike lane" implementations in my area and the whole "share the road" concept is bullshit. This is just aggravating drivers and giving a false sense of safety to bicyclists. Cars and bicycles don't mix.
In the US they're implemented in a ham-fisted way just to get federal ISTEA money for minimal effort. 90% of the lanes around me added in the last 10 years are unusable because they are broken by dangerous safety compromises.
In Bavaria we have most bike lanes as part of the sidewalk. They are clearly indicated and separated from the pedestrian zone by a 2-3cm drop. Eliminates most problems with cars. However, often the problem with the doors for side parking cars persists for the car's passenger side, which makes it less frequent but more likely that the person opening the door didn't look.
> In Bavaria we have most bike lanes as part of the sidewalk.
From my experience (in the UK) how usable those lanes are depends hugely on pedestrian discipline. There's one of those running alongside the seafront in Brighton that in my experience works well. The same style of lane that I've seen in and around London generally doesn't work as well: there are often pedestrians on the wrong side, not infrequently looking into their phones and/or wearing headphones.
What makes matters worse is that in the UK the rules are asymmetric: while it's an offence for a cyclists to go on the pedestrian side, there are no rules preventing pedestrians from walking on the cycle path (source: [1]).
The solution is to make pedestrians afraid of stepping into the bike lane. Pass them quickly, closely and surprisingly, if they run into something in the process all the better.
I can't tell whether you're being serious, but sadly there's indeed quite a lot of this us-vs-them and people behaving like arseholes to each other.
Not to mention that, in my jurisdiction, if this sort of behaviour led to injury or damage to property, the cyclist would almost certainly be found to be at fault, at least partially.
That's taking space from pedestrians instead of cars. I always see joggers, kids with rollerskates and moms with prams on these sidewalk bike lanes. Side parking and bike lanes cannot cohexist on the same side of the road without wasting another 3 ft of space for a door zone. Some of the useful bike lanes are raised a bit like a mini sidewalk separate from the pedestrian sidewalk or have a physical separator like bumpers.
Am a current cyclist and eskate rider, and I also bike on (not busy) roads with my young kids. Nothing I hate more than being honked- or yelled-at to "just go" when I have the right of way but am exercising an abundance of caution to make absolutely certain I'm not about to get ploughed by a car which may or may not come to a stop.
Yeah, an awful lot of drivers seem to forget that¹ I have the right to the entire lane, even as a cyclist. If you don't like it, you can use the other lane, if there is one, to go around me. If there isn't — tough! Am if I am occupying the entire lane, there is almost certainly a reason for it — like an upcoming left or because there isn't sufficient room for you to pass. Because if there weren't, fighting with a car is not high on my list of priorities: I'd much rather scootch over, give you room to get by so you can speed of into the sunset and I can have an empty road to myself.
¹IANAL; in the jurisdiction I'm in, but my understanding is that this is common
That's definitely the law here in the UK, although FWIW most of the time I don't feel the need to occupy the whole lane. Cars generally pass reasonably safely here, plus there generally isn't another lane on the kind of road I'd be cycling on.
> although FWIW most of the time I don't feel the need to occupy the whole lane.
Yeah, I perhaps should have made it clear that occupying a full lane is something I do probably <2% of the time. Not very often, and for similar reasons to the rest of the comment: I don't really want to have to deal with cars, and if I can stay right and let them by, I will.
I'm in America, so it depends on the road; where we have unprotected bike lanes, then I'm in that & there's passing room, but too often there are "sharrows" where there really isn't a good deal of room for passing. Then it's very situational. (Usually the car taking up part of an oncoming lane as they pass.)
In the UK you're not only allowed to take the whole lane, the Department for Transport (through Bikeability) calls this the primary road position for cyclists. The guidance is that this should be the default, with the secondary position (~1m to the left) only used when the road is wide and the rider is certain that keeping to the left wouldn't compromise their safety.
Yeah. I was on my eskate on a 4-lane road recently, riding 1m out from the curb due to gravel and debris (killer for those tiny wheels), and I had a car honking at me to get out of the way even when there was a whole other lane to change into!
He eventually did a half lane change, buzzing me as he went by, then got stuck at the next red light while I caught up. Ridiculous.
My area has the opposite problem: motorists offering to let cyclists go when they have the right of way. It's generous of them to make such an offer, but they don't seem to realize that the safest thing for a cyclist to do is follow the same rules as motorists when they are cycling in traffic.
(Of course my area also has reckless motorists who don't respect the rules of the road, but they seem to believe they are above the law whether they are interacting with cyclists or other motorists.)
This also drives me crazy, it’s nice of them but ends up complicating an already tricky turn or crossing or something else. The worst is when they do it in a situation where there’s more than one lane and I literally can’t see or expect cars in the other lane to also stop / slow down for me.
On left turns, I do a shoulder check right as the light turns green. People seem to be less inclined to wave cyclists through and less inclined to hesitate thinking the cyclist is going to dart through if the cyclist isn't looking in their direction.
Hilariously, sometimes I feel most comfortable on a bike in the road when I'm being a slight bit unsafe.
If I keep to the edge of the lane folks pass by me really close. If I'm going back and forth a bit and taking a whole lane up, cars give me the entire lane. It's wonderful
IMO the best is to occupy the center of the line to improve your visibility (especially when the road bends right) and to give the cars some incentive to slow down and overtake more on the left and then move closer to the right edge when they're actually overtaking you. This breaks down if the traffic is too heavy though.
The exception is on left bends. There it's best to stay on the right, for three reasons: better visibility, you can have a straighter trajectory with a higher speed and if there is only one lane in each direction, cars going too fast in the opposite direction may cross into your lane.
If you're zooming past cars in traffic and the driver can open the door and hit you, you're overtaking. If the passenger can hit you, you're undertaking.
I’ve noticed in various places in the Bay Area that new and improved bike lanes are being added.
A good example is a Bubb Rd, the part north of McClellan, in Cupertino (which has a bunch of Apple offices): much improved signalization and there’s now a bumper divider between the car and bike lane, making it very safe.
They also added much improved commuter bus access islands.
This is just one example. There are others. I don’t know if it’s because of COVID or because these things were already planned, but the lack of usual commuter and school traffic definitely made it easier to do the work.
> A good example is a Bubb Rd, the part north of McClellan, in Cupertino (which has a bunch of Apple offices): much improved signalization and there’s now a bumper divider between the car and bike lane, making it very safe.
Yeah, sadly a kid died on that stretch a few years back — likely why they added the new improved bike lane.
Because it changes the right of way and so you have to stop start more than you would otherwise.
This has been done in places in Cambridge UK (a reasonably bicycle friendly city). If your cycle lane is part of the road you can act like a car does - you get to ignore turnings because anyone joining the road has to give way as per normal. If you're on the pavement though, you're like a pedestrian - every turn off is a road you have to cross. Even if there isn't any traffic you have to slow down enough to look and as a cyclist what you want is constant speed.
If you can't quite see what I'm talking about aee this example from Milton Road: http://www.rtaylor.co.uk/images/milton-road-1.jpg The 'main' road is the one going into and out of the picture with cars on, and the image pictures a junction. You can see where the cycle lane 'crosses' the joining road and how you'd have to look for traffic (even ignoring the bump down and up that messes with a nice cadence).
If you're talking about sidewalks with separated pedestrian and cyclist traffic, some bike lanes are effectively that (e.g. raised to sidewalk level, left turn boxes on the right instead of forcing bikes to cut across traffic). They don't seem to be very common. Perhaps it's because it is a newer idea that people are unfamiliar with or maybe it is because it is less expensive to take some space from oversized lanes than it is to widen sidewalks.
You mean put the bicycles on the same sidewalks as the pedestrians? Maybe it sounds like a good idea to you but to someone who lives in the Netherlands that sounds completely insane.
Unless you meant something like [1] or [2] where there is a raised bicycle lane effectively on the sidewalk.
But even if they're part of the road that's not necessarily a problem [3], but in that case you'll want to have a reasonable speed limit (that sign on the road is 30 km/h, not 30mph) and you'll have to teach cars they're supposed to just be patient and slow down if they can't overtake.
You can't teach drivers such a thing, they still will be impatient. That's why cars and cyclers can't peacefully coexist on the same lane, another solution is needed.
It works well when there aren't too many pedestrians and they don't confuse the bike lane for a sidewalk too much.
On the other hand, if there are enough pedestrians, they will spill on the bike lane thinking it's a sidewalk. Or in some places, people really don't pay any attention and don't have a single care in the world, and will be totally oblivious to the fact that they are on a bike lane, even after ringing a very loud bike bell a few times right behind them.
My commute happens to have both of those configurations, and the second one is hell, to the point I'll rather ride on the bus lane (which is forbidden to cyclists) than risk a collision with a pedestrian.
Edit: I almost forgot, but since it tends to be between the road and the sidewalk, cars turning right will always check for pedestrians, but often fail to give way to cyclists, depending on how used they are to see cyclists coming. Some intersections have high change of T-bone because of that.
Pardon if I'm misunderstanding the layout you're describing, but I do wonder:
1. How often do pedestrians wander into those bike lane?
2. What are the rules at intersections? Specifically, does a bike lane along a major road have priority over minor roads at intersections, or are bikes required to give way to all traffic from both the major and the minor roads?
3. How obvious is it to drivers turning right from the rightmost lane that they might, in fact, be crossing a bike lane?
1. Depends on where. In busy areas it happens a lot. You just have to be careful when there are people around.
2. The bike lanes have their own traffic lights, which are on the same cycle as the cross walks to the right of them, and the main road/lights to the left.
3. It's obvious since these bike lanes are everywhere; it's just apart of driving. I will say it's a little worse in the West of the city though!
All the answers to this questions have a simple guideline for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians altogether: slow down if you can't predict what will happen next. There is no magic behind it. Someone won't pay attention and the difference between a crash or a near miss is usually at least one paid attention and slowed down.
1. Pedestrians do wander into bike lines quite a bit but I think it's improving because of the sheer number of e-bikes and scooters out there now.
2. The sidewalks and bike paths run together, and road crossings are dual marked. Everyone needs to exercise extra caution, of course.
3. Riders for the most parts have the same traffic flow as pedestrians. If you're turning right, you'll most likely cross both the sidewalk and the bike path at the same time.
Definitly a good question, given that pedal bikes exist in a grey area of traffic definitions in many areas, but I will say in my area (small urban area of 150k population) 95% of bike lanes are in areas without sidewalks, just dirt shoulders.
I think you're reading too much into this. Specialized stopped selling bikes on Amazon for the same reason Apple (as well as other high profile brands mentioned in the article like Nike, etc.) doesn't use Amazon as the primary retailer of their products - because it's an unnecessary middleman. Specialized is enough of a big, premium brand name that they can drive people to their own online shop directly. Online/DTC sales is inevitable in the bicycle industry, just like it has been for most other consumer products in the past decade, and prior to the pandemic Specialized had made a huge push into online sales to compete with the likes of Canyon (which was a bike company founded to take advantage of exactly this market gap which for whatever reasons the traditional brands were slow to get into).
The online model is also amazing for consumers as well (not to mention small indie bike manufacturers). Instead of choosing between maybe 2-5 bikes that might match my basic preferences and be in stock at my local bike shop, I have dozens if not hundreds of models to choose from made by any manufacturer around the world.
Sure, shops that do bike maintenance are important, but none of what you're saying here explains why any special interventions are needed for them. Won't the demand of more people using bicycles, and needing them fixed, be enough to keep these maintenance businesses healthy? I think bicycle advocates are much better off focusing on getting bikes to more people, and then improving cycling infrastructure to make it safer and more accessible to average people in everyday situations. The number of bike mechanics available is certainly not a major bottleneck that is keeping anybody from taking up cycling today.
I'm not reading into it. I literally remember reading articles about this (i'm a reddit bicycling mod so i see a lot) in like... i dunno, like 2010-ish?
I'm shocked that i can't find an old article about when they announced the change. Maybe my memory is wrong, and it could be, but I remember the local bike shop as being one of the main reasons for the change, even if that was just marketing.
You are right that we need local bike shops but I don't think we need more major chain shops. Admittedly a chain shop is better than NO shop at all if that's what you're dealing with in your area. In Philly, the Performance bike shop went out of business while many of the smaller independent shops have survived.
The good news is that bicycle fashion has tended towards more "city bikes" in the last decade or so. These have fewer frills and thus are simpler (== more durable) and also more maintainable by someone who is willing to learn the basics. The "basics" would be lube, fixing flats, brake maintenance and simple shifter adjustments. I think that's better than the earlier trends of "mountain bikes" with too many parts and stuff that's too hard to adjust for people without enough tools.
Look, I mean, I totally agree with you, but we're living in this system, and I'm terrified of the what happened to the bookstore industry happening to the local bike shop industry.
You look at the towns that still have quality book stores. You have a few cities that have thriving bookstores: Boston (likely because of students) and SF (likely because of cultural nostalgia and real estate laws, but these are now failing). You then have the consolidation model, where cities have one good bookstore that can compete against amazon: NYC (The Strand), Austin (Bookpeople), Portland (Powell's).
My point is that i would rather the cities follow this consolidation model than fail. You have one, trusted brand within the town, whose entire business model is built on quality and trust, because all parties know there's a cheaper alternative. This is where performance bikes failed, as they sacrificed quality service for price competitiveness. I was actively advising my friends to avoid their mechanics like the plague. The Trek shop seems to be moving in the other direction, as a boutique, with reasonably trusted service, so long as your using their products and, like apple, the added cost premium they charge.
This is not idealism, this is a practical model based on what is honestly a sense of fatalism. The automobile system we have is a path-dependent clusterfuck, and we have to be, not just willing, but be happy to take less than ideal outcomes to fight for real alternatives.
God, that maintenance thing is really a huge factor.
I used to be a bike tech. Somebody ordering a $5000 mountain bike might take a full day to put together. But if you gave me $5000 in cruiser bikes, I could have them all put together well and get some maintenance done. I really loathe how cruisers look, but goddamn they're some of the sturdiest pieces of junk I've ever worked on
I was actually thinking more of crappy $800 50lb "mountain bikes" with those cheap-ass all-plastic grip shifters and shitty "suspension" forks VERSUS an $800 basic city bike with low-end Shimano internal gear hub (or even single-speed).
I think many folks have developed a taste for actual practicality in their cycling needs and this is a good thing.
Oh definitely. Going back to that awful hideous cruiser.
I hate it so much. But if you have a bad back, that's the bike for you no question. You sit upright and you can add a rack for pannier bags. Upright posture, no weight there.
one of the bike stores in my town was bought by trek, now you can only buy expensive parts there. they dont sell anything low end or for beginners. the cheapest kids bike they sell was $200, lowest priced helmet was $80.
To be honest this is not an unreasonable bottom-end price. If your budget for a bicycle is lower than this you are better off looking at buying second-hand.
It’s not a reasonable bottom end because you can sell a viable kids bike for far less, and many people even in a wealthy nation like the US simply don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on a bike that will quickly become too small to use.
I agree with you that used is a better value, but Walmart will sell you a kid’a bike for a quarter of that price that is perfectly fit for many use cases. It will weigh more, be less durable and serviceable but if you’re looking for something that will be used to go around your 1/5 of a mile street a few times a week (a common kids bike use case) it’s fine.
The cost structure of an LBS isn't the same as Wal-Mart. You can't compare pricing equitably because the latter has a disproportionate influence over their suppliers. Also physical hard goods aren't the same as electronics. Their material inputs are always increasing in cost. Compare to prices these things sold for 40 years ago. A $50 kids bike in 1980 should by rights cost $160 today and they were never even that cheap back then. That Wal-Mart can sell a bike shaped object for $50 without any apparent concern for inflationary pressure is more indicative of significant compromises on build quality. The bicycle industry has an issue with ridiculous gouging on the mid/high end but the bottom end is reasonable if you don't set unrealistic expectations.
It would be much better for society overall to buy and sell secondhand, high quality, serviceable bikes than for everybody to buy a junk bike which is later trashed.
For a long time I was a student (yes, I did a PhD). I didn't have the cash for local bike shops.
Buying and supporting local is a luxury for the rich. I could not afford the $600 bikes they were selling. I bought $150 used bikes on Craigslist and repaired them myself. And no, not with parts from the bike shop. I could get the same parts at half price online, including from Amazon. Usually I could tune up a $150 bike for another $25 in parts and that's a lot cheaper than $600.
If local bike shops want my business, and pretty much the business of students in general, they need to get with the beat and be cheaper than Amazon.
Oh btw -- last week I changed my bike pedals for one that I got on Amazon for $20. I have never seen a bike shop sell such good pedals at this price point. I have never even seen a bike shop sell this brand ("ROCKBROS"). They usually sell some super expensive brand like Shimano only. They also seem to have politics against selling competing brands sometimes, and Amazon has none of that bullcrap, you see all the brands and you buy the best.
The problem is that there's two types of people who ride bikes.
Commuters who want to spend less than $200 on just something to get them moving, parents riding with their kids are also here.
Cyclists who spent 10-20-40 hours per week on a bike. For a hobby that you spend 60hr/mo on it's reasonable to spend $1300 on an entry level road bike and much more as you progress. Especially because it's good for your health.
Obviously there's money to be made with cyclists, but commuters would be so cheap and budget concerned that there's no money to be made from it.
Amazon is perfect because you're not looking for quality. I use a rockbros sweat catcher for my indoor training bike setup and it's great because it's just fabric.
You want LBS to stock $20 pedals? Who is going to buy them? What would the margins on that be? I wouldn't trust $20 clipless pedals (because if they fail you will get hurt/injured) and if they're flat pedals then bmx people would buy flat, but they're going to be so heavy that it'll be bad performance wise. There's only broke students who would buy it, and at that point just get it from Amazon.
I spend a lot of time on a bike. I don't spend $1300 on bikes.
There are people who want the latest carbon fiber blah blah just because they are using it for sport. I have no problem with them. But I have my current $200 Craigslist bike, it would have been $900 MSRP, but it rides fine, it's a little heavier than those carbon fiber things but so what? I get more exercise, and worry slightly less about theft, which buys me a LOT of freedom because I can just lock it up in downtown San Francisco and enjoy my day. If it gets stolen I just buy another bike, no biggie. If my landlord confiscates it, I just buy another bike, no biggie.*
Yeah, I agree, it's reasonable to spend $1300. If you have $1300. But it's also okay to NOT want to spend $1300 and still want to take it up as a serious hobby. I for one am pretty happy with my $200 bike.
I don't use clip pedals, I just use flat pedals, and these $20 aluminum flat pedals are nice and solid. I tried SPD clips before and hated that stuff. To each is own.
I have done many long distance trips, and I avoid proprietary or hard-to-find components because it's awesome that I can find replacement components in some random village in rural China or rural Myanmar or rural anywhere I go.
*Saves me on rent anyway because apartments in my area with proper bike storage OR enough apartment sqftage to store bikes inside have rent rates higher than my current rent plus the cost of a new bike per month. It still saves me money to stay at my current cheap apartment, lock bike to the pool fence (because property manager refuses to install bike racks on the premises), get it confiscated every now and then, and keep buying new bikes.
$1300 will not get you a carbon bike. It will get you a new Trek Domane AL3 which is aluminum. Carbon is usually an option on prebuilt bikes starting in the $2000-$3000 range.
You don't need carbon to workout or bikepack, but your comfort level increases.
I love SPD, but that's because I have had my feet slip on flat pedals and seen how close I was to getting injured because of it
If you're going bikepacking in a place where there's not going to be any high end mechanics then I agree that using the most common components makes sense because then anybody can help you. Although I've heard that to go bikepacking in China you need a local handler in a car following you, so I would probably just have them carry spare components there.
And yeah, I don't lock my bike outside, only in groups where we can maintain eye contact with the bikes while sitting down. If I commuted by bike I would use something much much cheaper.
I got a Trek 2300 carbon fiber for $150 once, used. :S
I mean, I don't go to LBS, that's how I get carbon fiber at insanely cheap prices. People who are brainwashed into supporting LBS will get their carbon bikes for $3000.
Used that bike for a while, even checked it in on a plane to Taiwan, no insurance or anything, rode around for a couple weeks, didn't worry too much about handling by the airline since for $150 I could replace it if it got damaged. Worry-free is freedom at its best.
The bike got confiscated in California later on, then I bought a $200 used bike to replace it.
I'm happy to pay for the skilled labour of bike servicing and parts fitting. I wish bike stores would acknowledge that that's what I'm paying them for and fit parts that I've bought myself (probably off Amazon), charging a fair price that lets them make a reasonable overall margin. Don't try to keep a parts selection instore, use the space for the mechanics and just those parts that people might need urgently (i.e. some pedals that are good enough to ride home on if you broke off your current pedals - if I'm upgrading to fancy pedals I'm going to want to choose them specifically).
>Cyclists who spent 10-20-40 hours per week on a bike. For a hobby that you spend 60hr/mo on it's reasonable to spend $1300 on an entry level road bike and much more as you progress. Especially because it's good for your health.
how is using lighter expensive bike using fancy 0.5% less friction gearboxes better for your health? If you wanted health benefits you would be using the heaviest shittiest bike possible for more resistance.
If you go on big rides in the middle of nowhere then you can't really afford to have components fail on you. I always take a few tools, small parts etc. but if something like a pedal or stem fails I'm walking a long way home. Quality components are made of different materials (e.g. higher grades of Alu) and manufactured using better processes (e.g. cold forging, not stamped) so they are stronger and lighter. I also don't pick the very lightest components since I need durability.
Aside from that, the joy of riding is what gets me out. Many cyclists choose tough hill climbs for added fitness gains and challenge. There is a good kind of difficulty (steep grade somewhere picturesque) and a bad kind (unresponsive bike that doesn't roll well)
I don't usually go to the middle of nowhere, most often I'm going through a bunch of towns. In the worst case I can shove the bus on a bike to get to the next town.
Time and time again I have found that failure happens even with the best of components, and having standard components means you can find replacements more easily. Having a steel bike means the village welding expert in a random town in rural China can fix the frame, or fix your broken rack. Having standard spokes, tire, etc. means the LBS in Burmese village (who unlike American LBS, are actually reasonably priced) will have parts that work with your bike. Having standard brake pads and cables means you can get them anywhere when they wear down.
Shittiest and heaviest bikes are really unpleasant to ride. And if you don't enjoy the ride, you don't ride.
Additional point: shitty bikes usually have really terrible geometries and will fuck up your health if you decide to use them for sport. If your shitty bike calls itself an 'MTB' and you take it onto a trail, it is very likely for it to actually break if you catch even a tiny jump (let's say 20-30 cm root) because the welds are terrible, and the metal is brittle.
I said it's good for your health, not that we're optimizing solely for health. You're right that the most frictiony setup could be beneficial.
But also, a higher performance bike will help you go further & faster. It doesn't mean you will end up exerting less effort, it just means that you will go faster and you'll keep putting in the same effort. With this time saving you can try new routes, feel more comfortable going further or bike packing with higher quality gear. It wouldn't change how long I ride for, but it increases the options for where to go.
Yes there are diminishing gains as with anything, but an entry level bike is still going to be below the Shimano 105 point of performance vs cost.
Greg Lemond said that "it never get easier, you just go faster." A nicer bike isn't going to mean that you work any less hard, it just means you go faster. And fast is fun.
> Amazon is perfect because you're not looking for quality. I use a rockbros sweat catcher for my indoor training bike setup and it's great because it's just fabric.
Guess they're just a chinese integrator/reseller and quality may vary a lot among different products but I have to say I'm really happy with my backpacking bags (waterproof top-tube and frame bags) I got from them on amazon. I wouldn't trust them with anything "mechanical" though.
Pedals, especially flats (which btw are used by plenty of MTBers), are a breed of their own... they usually come from the same few factories and final price depends on who puts their logo on them. For a good while you could find the very same pedals from HT and from plenty of other minor brands for prices varying from 30 to ~150 euros.
I dunno, a lot of the time I get higher quality products from China, AND for cheaper. There is much more advanced manufacturing tech there now. You just need to buy from a reliable company that knows their shit.
Sometimes if it is just poor assembly quality you can patch it up yourself easily. If screws are unscrewing themselves out all that's needed is a little Loctite or lock nuts. The metal is still perfectly fine.
Sometimes it's just patents that drive up prices in the US, for some stupidly simple thing like a bike pedal patents shouldn't exist, and for practical purposes it would be laughable to have a patent on some low tech stuff like that in China.
Sure but I'm not really sure how that applies to the biking world and to the initial topic here.
Sure you can get various decent accessories from china, but for most of the basic maintainance you need to source proper components (drivetrain, brakes, tyres, suspensions) from respected brands. You can go to the LBS, let them do the work and pay a premium or you can do it yourself sourcing components online for half the price. You could also source the components to the LBS and do the work yourself but that's usually the more expensive solution. As it often happens the most ethical choice of willingly financing LBSs is only accessible to the rich.
If you're looking for cheaper, look into Dahon bikes, they're decent value and much cheaper. Especially if you can get a used one that has been kept well, you can often get it for less than half of the MSRP.
Expensive but worth it. Brompton designs are far better than the alternatives. They hold their value pretty well too, if it turns out you don't like it.
Agreed. Bike shop business models are problematic and it's worth shopping around. My local shops sell a lot of stuff at reasonable prices and we have 4 shops in walking distance of each other so there's some competition but at times it feels like being ripped off. And it feels worse being ripped off by your neighbor somehow. When that happens I don't feel bad about getting stuff from nashbar or similar.
Pedals are a good example, ridiculously overpriced at the shops. Luckily we have a non-profit called "The Bike Collective" that strips donated bikes and sells parts super cheap, they also help with repairs.
Exactly. I support local businesses if they're reasonable. I get that rent and everything can add a bit to the cost. But if they're just greedy scam artists asking 2-3x the price you can get online for everything, expecting your charity just for being local, then I won't shed a tear when they go bankrupt.
If it's got very fancy colors it's a shitty plastic throwaway product. Shimano pedals are not fancy but they are cheap for what they are and built to survive a nuclear war.
Looks like you've gotten a good product for your use case. But flat pedals like that are generally intended for mountain bikes and I bet I know which of those two products is more likely to shatter into pieces if it glances off a rock.
>Buying and supporting local is a luxury for the rich.
This is extremely myopic. The entire point of cycling-as-transit, is that, as an investment, it's by far the most inexpensive alternative. If you're under the assumption that you'll already have a car, or free access to transit, or live on campus, then I see your argument. However, cycling as an alternative to these things is wildly, wildly inexpensive, even factoring in bikes that cost thousands of dollars.
The cost of luxuriously maintaining a bicycle is about $100-$200 annually. The cost of maintaining an automobile is about $8000 annually, it's just that the costs are broken up into micropayments on things like fuel or hiding in the depreciation.
First of all I didn't own a car. You're right that it's several thousand dollars annually and that's why I didn't own a car.
> The cost of luxuriously maintaining a bicycle is about $100-$200 annually
That's if you fix it yourself. I spent <$100/year on maintaining my bike.
Changing brake pads at a bike shop cost upwards of $60. Wheel truing, probably >$200. Attempting to buy brake pads and refusing brake pad changing service usually involved a stupid long conversation with them to convince them you didn't need service, and they would price gouge you on the brake pads. With Amazon it cost me a grand total of $8 for the new pads, shipping included, and not having to convince anyone that I'm competent at fixing my own bicycle.
I once had a pedal stuck in my crank and just needed a longer wrench with more leverage to get it out. Damn bike shop wouldn't sell me the wrench. They wanted to do it themselves and charged me fucking $40 for TWO MINUTES of work. WTF. Needless to say I never visited that shop again.
You are under impression that your skill in fixing things is free. Vast majority of people can not change break pads, can not understand a youtube video explaining how, can not oil a chain, can not fix a flat. Ability to problem solve and fix things is how a trade person of handyman can make very good money, as even using a stud finder and putting a screw in the wall is arcane magic to lots of people.
This is tragic but this is current state of western civilization. Bring Shop back to school.
I doubt that the vast majority of people cannot understand a youtube video explaining how, nor that the vast majority of folks cannot oil a chain. Most folks can use a stud finder and put a screw in the wall and it seems like a rather poor reading of humanity to judge people on this, especially considering how many folks live in apartments that disallow holes in the wall (and have never had a need to learn the skill).
I bought a bike last year. I've never seen anyone as unhelpful as the staff there. I even decided to start servicing more complicated parts (fork/shock) myself to avoid visiting places like this. Bay Area prices for labor are insane. Maybe I'll give wheels for truing somewhere local since it's tedious and I don't have that much time.
On the other hand I've lived in places where truing wheels, servicing suspension fork and other regular servicing was really worth it. Prices were good, wait (1-2 weeks in the summer) decent and you were sure that they did a good job. No screwing around just to have the customer get wheel out of true 1-2 weeks later, they'd rather tell me to replace the spokes when needed instead of doing a crappy job. Whatever needed to be replaced (rotor, brake pads etc.) during the service was sold at online-like prices.
I completely understand that plenty of local bike stores offer no value to anyone who can do basic maintenance. I hope they go bankrupt as early as possible.
I'm not scared I'll run out of good bike stores. There's plenty of complicated tech that requires good technician. E-bikes and other trend also help.
Maybe you need a better shop? A couple of weeks back I broke a couple of spokes (finally found the weight limit of a Gazelle Heavy Duty NL bike - probably about 200kg of people), they fixed the spokes, realigned the wheel, and replaced the chain for €35.
Local bike shops aren't exactly rolling in dough. If you ask your local car mechanic how much they'd charge to remove a stuck bolt you'll also encounter a labor minimum that'll be a lot more than $40.
Again... I don't care about how much you, or I, spend on bikes. I'm a nerd, I do most of the work myself. You seem like that too.
I'm talking about cost in relation to alternatives. If the cost in relation to alternatives is low, then you can easily afford luxurious maintenance, as you'd be spending the same money, and lots more, paying for any alternative.
Just because the cost in relation to alternatives is low does not mean that you can easily afford luxurious maintenance. Some folks are poor, and spending more on x means less for y - and sometimes y is food or electricity.
Heck, that last one is true even if you aren't doing luxurious maintenance.
> I'm actually surprised and optimistic to see the major manufacturer Trek start building their own brick and mortar shops in certain major cities
I wouldn’t be too optimistic. We have one in Toronto. When I brought in my trek that I bought from them to fix it, it cost a fortune and they didn’t actually fix it properly.
Similar to servicing your car at the dealer. It’s super expensive. Difference being the quality of work is questionable (no doubt varies quite a bit).
Lesson: learn to fix your own bike or settle for crappy big box bikes instead.
Non-chain shops might be better. I'm learning to service my own bike because the cost of labor and overhead is really high in the US compared to where I got hooked on road cycling (Vietnam).
I have a lot of tools that I got so I could service my bike. Now, the industry has moved on with various sizing standards and these tools will be useless when I get a new bike.
Going to suggest high schools add a bike repair class/course. They can work on bikes students bring in, get the knowledge they need to fix their own bikes.
I would actually write to trek about that. The shop here in SF seems pretty solid, but I don't currently have a Trek bike, so I might be wrong. I agree with you on the analogy, but I'm pushing for the apple-store parallel. No serious computer nerd would use an apple-store as a serious place to maintenance their laptop, but novice to intermediate computer users would, even if they have to go back a few times.
> 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?
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".
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.
Oh I just realized they meant inner tube and not top tube (I was confused about that while reading it)
Yeah an inner tube for $35? And it's not even those fancy orange ones?
Well it's not hard to change it yourself, as long as they're not charging more than $4 for a basic ones. If they are actually selling it for $35 that's pretty yikes. I'd just buy it online given that it doesn't benefit from retail (you don't need to see a tube in person, just need to know the dimensions)
The bike shop can't compete on price with the biggest online retailers/Amazon. I have my doubts about a tube costing $35. $10 or $15 rather than the $5 you'd get online, but I have been to a lot of bike shops and that 10x markup doesn't comport with anything I've seen. Perhaps the $35 also includes the labor? (Also, it's an inner tube - it's a cheap commodity product, who cares if it's a Chinese no-name brand?)
Bike shops need to charge for labor because most people don't buy bikes from bike shops anymore, so labor is where they make their money. $100/hr for labor is on the higher end but doesn't seem crazy in expensive locations. Not to mention that the prevailing way people treat bike shops (as places you can walk in at any time, get your bike fixed, and walk out) is incredibly antithetical to bike mechanics actually being able to take the uninterrupted time to focus and do good work.
> Carbon is more comfortable by reducing the vibrations that you'll feel compared to aluminum.
Is it actually noticeable for an average cyclist? I don't doubt it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a marketing slogan from carbon frame producers and people went with it, and since their bicycles were more expensive, they "felt" better.
> they were trying to sell so much fragile carbon fiber stuff that was miles outside of my budget range
This is self-awareness issue. At what point did you realise you'd wandered into the wrong shop for your target segment? Judging by the misrepresentation of the genuine preferences of folks like me, as being somehow nonsensical or antithetical, I suspect, "not yet".
I'm reminded of the vegetarian who visits a steakhouse and complains there's nothing for them on the menu but salad.
> all they had was some Chinese brand
Place of origin indicates nothing about the item manufactured, and product labeling even less so. Most bicycle tube & tyre production is in E/SE Asia.
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.
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.
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.
A chain for a high end group (like a XX1 Eagle) is 80$. A replacement cassette - that you will need after 2-3 chains is 300-500$.
And if you are into mountainbiking - there is also a fair amount of chance you might break something like a derailleur and spend a few hundred to fix that.
Chain is indeed a wear item. It costs tens of dollars to replace.
$1000 groupsets simply don't deteriorate in the manner you describe. Source: I rode many thousands of kilometers on my gravel/adventure bike, including a 1000km ride around Kenya (very dusty, rocky roads where there are roads). The only two groupset components I needed to replace on this 2016 bike so far were the derailleur hanger and a jockey wheel. The former got bent due to carelessness on my part and could have been straightened, but I chose to replace it for structural reasons. The bearing in the latter got a little sticky and so I replaced the jockey wheel.
Each of the two parts cost the equivalent of US$15 here in the UK.
I think this is a very long way from replacing the entire $1000 groupset, which was what the post I was replying to suggested.
I am talking about the groupset (the shifters, brake levers, brake calipers, derailleurs, crankset, bottom bracket, chain and cassette).
There are indeed some wear items (chain; cassette, especially if the chain isn't replaced when worn; brake pads; brake rotors) but, apart from those, a looked-after quality groupset can last decades.
> Bikes are pretty low maintenance, the repairs are usually fairly simple
Most forks and rear shocks require full service yearly or more frequently (typically every 100 to 200 hours). It is not that simple and requires experience and tools. Tubeless tires are messy. Bleeding breaks is another thing I would rather not do at home. And frankly, I can never setup my derailleur as well as my mechanic.
> the parts are cheap
Shocks, forks, transmission components, performance wheels are easily in the iPhone category and beyond.
Clothing, protection, accessories, smaller components like handlebar stems or seatposts are still usually in the three digit range.
You would be surprised to know how much consumables like chains and tires can cost per year.
> low volume service
I might be living in a place where both MTB and road cycling are very popular, but bike mechanics have so much work that they redirect clients to each other.
> If a bike is really damaged it usually makes more sense to just replace it wholesale
Full suspension bikes can easily have a $2K frame and $2K worth of components. Unless it was hit by a freight train, the bike is almost never completely destroyed by a crash. So it makes sense to replace what's broken. If the frame is solid, everything else is replaceable.
As long as bikes are ridden hard, there is always work for mechanics, and it can be pretty expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if you can do routine maintenance - and I can’t recommend learning basic maintenance highly enough - sooner or later your bike will get damaged by a wreck, falling over, getting backed into, or ending up in way too much water for too long. You want a pro who can tell you fix or replace.
And you don’t want to deal with counterfeit items either.
> sooner or later your bike will get damaged by a wreck, falling over, getting backed into, or ending up in way too much water for too long. You want a pro who can tell you fix or replace.
If you ask a store, the answer will always be replace. They don't want to deal with liability questions ("but that store told me it would be good to ride"), so they will pick the safe answer.
This will be especially true for components like a carbon frame, where even the best equipped stores will lack the equipment to perform a proper check - like an x-ray device.
However the store might help you getting a discount on the replacement or get it warrantied.
Materials probably play a role in that. When I was in the biz we still had steel bikes, so the answer was sometimes just a new fork, if the bike was worth more than the parts and labor. When it’s in the cusp we recommended an upsell, because why spend all that money on an old bike you’ve already broken once? For some in particular we knew they would break them again, and there’s a happy medium of repairable and reasonable. One guy had a death wish and a dad who owned a bunch of businesses. He broke so much gear and that guy (or his dad rather) was keeping everyone else’s prices lower.
Yes and no. I think what most people think of when they think bicycle is the throw away kind that you buy at you local big box retailer or sporting goods store. These are toys in the sense the they were likely meant for casual recreation and at most might get a tire patched or some other simple repair.
My kids all ride former-toy bicycles that I've had for a song from FB Marketplace and nursed back to health.
But yeah, I think the GP is speaking aspirationally. We need to get to a place where bikes are considered infrastructure the way a vehicle is, that everyone has one, and has a selection of shops around them to service it, same as everyone currently has lots of garages, dealers, and gas stations around to meet the needs of their automobile.
If bikes get to that point, that means buying parts online to me. Making it hard to get parts is not generally supportive of cycling IMO.
I buy almost all of my parts to service our cars online. Amazon, RockAuto, and brand-specific parts suppliers (PeachParts, HandA/Bernardi, Ricambi, etc.) I can recall going to a physical dealer 3 times in the last 20 years and each time it was for a “I need it exactly this afternoon and I’m willing to pay for it in dollars and inconvenience”.
Maybe to you it's a more convenient experience, but not everyone has the same approach to shopping. Some are happy to receive advice for specific products (or to have someone tell them what quality level they're going for), while others are simply happy to be able to have a human interaction at the counter (i'm in both categories).
Moreover, i'm not convinced online shopping is better for society at large. From an ecological perspective, from an anti-monopoly perspective..
Ecological perspective, it's better than having a single person driving a significant distance to a specific destination. (On top of the maintenance of that destination) Whereas - delivery wise... you're like a few hundred extra feet of driving maybe. (Assuming you live in a city/decently-sized suburb)
Packaging is the only issue that needs to be solved more efficiently but there are potential solutions to that.
The point is that if you're performing your own service of your car, you're already more of an enthusiast than your bicycling counterpart. Cycling for transportation needs to work for the mainstream, buy it from a dealer on installment, take it to the shop for routine maintenance, treat it as an appliance consumer. Enthusiasts will always find a way in spite of bad infrastructure.
I used to cycle as a means of transportation. Much faster than walking, on par with the bus, paid for itself in six months from money saved in transit fees.
I would generally order nothing online because I didn't have the education or interest to know what I was buying or what needed done. Part of the value of a good, physical shop is the relationship you form with people and being able to trust their expertise. I definitely needed some one I could look in the eye, explain my problem, and ask them to solve it for me.
I don't say this to contradict you necessarily, especially in your primary point, just to offer a very different perspective.
I think your situation is a quite common one. People prefer to shop in-person in a lot of situations and will continue to do so.
In the context of this article, those people are already buying these parts at bike shops. Removing them from Amazon doesn’t change this group’s buying habits.
Not everyone is capable of handling the labor portion of the (labor + parts) equation of servicing a bike (not to mention a fleet of bikes for family).
I certainly can only handle the basics and the family rides a decent amount of miles/wk.
I buy local - many times it's even cheaper than Amazon - and I live in an expensive metro.
I think the point is to enlarge the community. More local bike shops and services will lead to more riders, firstly because they’ll notice it as an option whereas many wouldn’t have before and secondly because the more there are the closer they’ll be to anyone’s home or workplace, thus more convenient.
I would expect new bike shop openings to significantly lag, not lead, local cycling popularity, but maybe that’s only the case in areas where real estate is expensive.
I very highly doubt we are going to get there until electric bikes (even if electric-assisted bikes) are the standard and affordable. Bikes might be great for most folks on flat land, but mountains are an uphill battle (pun intended) for anyone starting out as an adult and simply put, not everyone is going to do such a thing.
Additionally, most places I've lived didn't have bike racks (small to medium sized towns in Indiana), nor did a lot of workplaces put much money into employee break rooms. You can change out of those wet clothes in the public restroom, but it would be unacceptable to show up wet with sweat.
Cars just require parking spaces, and employers don't have to provide those.
My wife and kid wanted cruiser style single speed bikes...what you'd call a toy. And I'm not hung up in that word, it is what it is. But they bike a couple miles a day going to and from school. They sit all day in the sun and rain and just keep ticking away. They were both less than 200, and honestly, I don't see what would be gained in spending more given the criteria, other than perhaps appeasing 'bikesnobs'(is that a thing? I was thinking of something like beer snobs).
Sure it's not a race bike, or mountain bike, but they still work just fine for transportation.
I think of my road bike and the mountain bikes I owned when I did that.. So toys(sports equipment).
But yeah, the majority of the US population probably thinks recreational bikes for their kids and maybe the ones they own to ride with their kids.. Also toys.
> Bicycles are not toys. They are vehicles that need maintenance. You can do much of that maintenance yourself if you're a nerd, but the vast majority of cyclists are dependent on local bike shops to sustain the cycling community.
This is true. Although, I'm afraid the business model of a local bike shop is not sustainable at the moment, at least in Europe where the markups on components and service are just outrageous. It almost seems like the industry is following the footsteps of car industry which is based on franchised D2C sales points and incredibly high margins on servicing.
Unfortunately, for folks who want to save money the only option is to learn how to maintain and fix your own bike using components sourced from online stores.
The same can be said of numerous products/industries 'disrupted' by YC/HN types. Kettle/pot? Specialized are no angels themselves. There are no sacred cows anymore - sorry but screw your small/local/artisanal shite - this from someone who would've ordinarily supported your sentiment. But these aren't ordinary times - the quest for economies of scale will bring scorched earth to everybody one way or another.
Pre-covid, I used a bicycle as my main commute method for ~8 years in three different major cities. In my opinion, local bike shops are among the most corrupt and unethical business, and I eagerly await their demise.
I do most of my own maintenance, but for basic things and low cost parts (chains, tires, wheels) my experience is that bike shops lie about the necessity of replacements and bill 2-3x markup for parts, in addition to billing for labor.
Not a cyclist but I agree with your post, we need to better support small businesses, even if it costs a tad more.
That is the issue with Amazon, it’s easy to get things from and cheaper, which also increases our want to buy more crap we don’t need, and fuelling a business capable of potentially doing serious harm to the competitive landscape.
My partner recently purchased some specialist cake toppers, from a one woman shop, they where super expensive but they looked really high quality, and she was so happy we was happy with the product, and I think that should be part of the purchase experience, that we can get a sense of satisfaction that we have helped a small business stay open.
I think Jeremy Clarkson said it best (surprisingly), and it was something alone the lines of the following.
Stop haggling, a dollar is a lot of money to these people, it’s nothing to you, just pay them the price asked.
> I'm actually surprised and optimistic to see the major manufacturer Trek start building their own brick and mortar shops in certain major cities,
Wait, wasn’t this always the case? I recall multiple Trek stores in the Toronto area at least a decade ago. I always though this was part of their model (vertically integrated retail), although other stores did sell their bikes also (exactly like Apple).
I just bought a Trek bike at a local Trek store a couple months ago and it definitely wasn’t a new store. Looking now, there are six (!) Trek stores all over the San Diego area. That’s actually more than the number of Apple stores IFAICT.
Maybe they are just expanding this model to some other part of the world?
> They are vehicles that need maintenance. You can do much of that maintenance yourself if you're a nerd, but the vast majority of cyclists are dependent on local bike shops to sustain the cycling community.
I do my own maintenance and choose to use local bike shops to source parts. I'm not really a bike nerd. I service my own bike since it's more convenient to pull out my spare bike to buy some easily transportable parts than it is to transport a bike to the shop. I can also fix my bike in an evening and have it ready for the next day, while it may take a shop a couple of days to get around to it.
> You can do much of that maintenance yourself if you're a nerd
I’m finding this to less true these days. As bikes become more ‘integrated’ with components specific to the model they’re becoming harder to fix. It’s particularly bad with aero bikes that have aero handlebars, weird stems and internal routing.
Even if you’re a bike nerd, what you know won’t really apply on another bike anymore.
They cop a lot of ridicule for being impractical but a fixed gear track bike with a single front brake has been my daily commuter / beater for years with minimal maintenance. You can ride them through anything and they keep going, replace brake pads occasionally, a chain or a sprocket very occasionally and that’s basically it. I think they’re perfect from a maintenance perspective but it does depend on where you live.
Sheldon Brown had some good articles about their versatility.
I'm happy to see you mention Trek. I've started shopping for a bike and there happens to be a Trek bike store in my city. I've never even heard of them until I looked up bike shops on google maps and Trek showed up. The fact that you mention them gives me more confidence that they're someone worth buying from.
From the article: "PNW wasn’t the only business growing tired of Amazon. Kerson and his team asked buyers at every retailer who stocks PNW parts to remove them from their Amazon stores too, so that everyone involved could maximize their profits and not undercut each other." ... “We set up these calls and we were not expecting them to go very well,” says Marshall, “As soon as we started talking about it the buyers were really excited.”
From the FTC: "Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors that raises, lowers, or stabilizes prices or competitive terms ... Price fixing relates not only to prices, but also to other terms that affect prices to consumers, such as shipping fees, warranties, discount programs, or financing rates. Antitrust scrutiny may occur when competitors discuss the following topics: ..., Capacity, Identity of customers, ... Defendants may not justify their behavior by arguing that the prices were reasonable to consumers, were necessary to avoid cut-throat competition, or stimulated competition." [1]
Is there a lawer who can say if that was price fixing?
IANAL, but I think this would qualify as a resale price maintenance agreement[1], which is legal at a federal level and in most (but not all!) states. I guess it really depends on what exactly "not undercut each other" entailed.
The US used to have "fair trade" laws with these kind of agreements. These were used to protect independent grocers from chain department stores...they were the Amazon of the 1940/50s. Plus ca change.
But the legality of this kind of thing depends on the circumstances. From what I have read, it seems unlikely to be illegal (it is perfectly normal for a manufacturer to supply a product and attempt to stop a buyer selling into a particular channel) but I am not sure it is a great idea to say you are doing this specifically to increase prices.
To give you an example I came across recently, when Sony came to the US they dealt with US wholesalers. Some wholesalers would sell to product to retailers who wanted to aggressively discount product. So Sony eventually stopped selling to wholesalers, and sold directly to retailers who wouldn't discount their product. It is a fine line but the manufacturer always has the choice of not selling to a certain buyer anyway (and tbf, as dollar stores have shown, some retailers will get around the manufacturer's rules anyway).
So I don't think it is particularly unreasonable for a manufacturer to tell customers to stop putting product into a certain channel, and it probably isn't anticompetitive (because it doesn't limit the ability of competitors to sell on Amazon).
If they don't actually increase prices for consumers, because they all collectively save money not paying amazon fees it is unlikely to be an antitrust violation
"maximize their profits and not undercut each other"
This is another way of saying, "charge the customer more". While this may work in the short term, there is likely another parts company that will not feel this way and once again look to sell on Amazon since they'll be able to undercut while still making a profit.
Especially since PNW (mostly?) Doesn't make their own products - they put their brand on a bunch of generic products that get sold by various different brands, and act as a distributor and marketer.
If people want to buy on Amazon for less, somebody else can buy parts from the same OEMs and sell them on Amazon.
My understanding from the article is that it was a phone conversation between PNW and all their retail stores, which were each customers. The customers were all competitors of each other, which is why they discussed how to not undercut each other.
Ortlieb[0], the very appreciated maker of bicycle bags, is not selling over Amazon. They are selling online, but your order/payment is sent directly to a local shop delivering to you (in Germany). I really like it.
Some years ago, Amazon was pushing "Ortlieb bag" adverts on Google to redirect to Amazon where the bags were not to be found and was sued. Amazon lost[1].
Similarly Peak Design (a well respected brand of quality camera gear including backpacks) is not selling on Amazon. See recent HN thread [0] about Amazon making a cheap knock-off of their product.
I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon. I have cut my amazon purchases down to only 16 total items this year so far ( down from ~50 in 2020 ) and I am now only ordering from Amazon as a last option when I cant find what I want anywhere else. That brief glimpse of the Amazon future where all stores are shut down, and we can only ever buy things online, and everyone is an amazon serf was such a wakeup call as to what we were heading towards. I just hope enough people can jump ship to keep a functioning non amazon centric supply chain.
> I am happy the parts company is ditching Amazon, but its so much more important for us consumers to ditch amazon.
Conversely, maybe it's important for both big and small businesses to realize that investing in your online presence and building out a high-quality local delivery network is much more important than the high-rent place on Main Street?
A lot of the reasons I buy on Amazon are that it offers a much more pleasant experience. In fact, if you go to the manufacturers' sites for a lot of the products Amazon sells, they have a slow checkout process, scammy discount codes and email signup incentives, and generally optimize for consumer lock-in rather than getting the product to the consumer quickly. Imagine Google if it had popped up a discount code for "Get 200 searches at 15% off!" every time you searched for something, and think of how successful they would be if they did that.
As for a lot of small-time local shops I know, they seem to place an unduly high value on prime real estate, and their websites are at the level of “My nephew says he knows Dreamweaver”.
In summary, I am not super surprised they are being beaten out by Amazon, and it is unclear to me as to why I should subsidize their bad web design and reluctance to invest in building a consumer-friendly online experience.
Thankfully you are not the only person to realize this and a multi-billion dollar industry sprung up to help independent retailers compete. A Shopify website has a customer experience similar to Amazon. The real issue is Amazon has so much market capture that most people don't even look for independent retailers. In fact even suggesting that you can go other places online gets a bunch of push back from people insisting that nothing can compete, and that somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency.
Maybe I am looking in the wrong places, but precisely zero of my local retailers have anything that looks like a Shopify storefront. And it's about the tools (Shopify is a great one), but also about the attitude. Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”. Hence they ignore fast deliveries and push coupons and loyalty programs and crowded stores.
Ironically, this leads to a place where the only long-lasting relationship the customer ends up having is with Amazon, which is a pretty shitty company.
> somehow it's moral to ignore all externalities in the name of pure market efficiency
I am not saying that, or I don't think I am anyway. I think the retailers are not taking the externality of reduced attention span in a serious way like Google or Amazon. The technology totally exists for a local retailer to get my location, and deliver a product to me with 3 clicks in under an hour.
And yet, apart from food delivery startups (that are not local, and simulate such an experience via a layer), few actual goods retailers (say, my local hardware store) have invested in building such an experience. I can't recall any of them having the courage to at least test out a pilot program with such an experience.
Either way, I do try to support my local retailers as much as I can; and my usage of Amazon has seen a slow but steady drop-off over the last 3 years. But that's mainly due to the fact that Amazon makes
> Amazon has the attitude of “get the thing to the customer, immediately”. Most of the other places have an attitude of “we want to build a long-lasting relationship with you, the consumer”.
Sometimes that long-lasting relationship is what ends up paying dividends in better service, though. I'm by no means unwilling to shop around, but I have been a long-time customer at my LBS and will always look to them first. I crashed in a weekend cross race two years ago and bent my rear brake rotor when the rider behind me rode over it. My LBS didn't have my rotor in stock, but they called around and found when at another shop in the US and had it shipped up before the weekly Tues night series. That's for a lowly low-category masters racer.
When you have a personal relationship with a business, it is possible for them to pull out all the stops when it matters.
At its peak point of customer experience value (which Amazon has definitely past), Amazon was great because it was generally easy to find a good set of options for whatever you were looking to buy, in one place/one search.
Now, it’s full of fake/cheap crap with manipulated reviews and “sponsored” search results. Before it was good about exposing useful data (e.g.: “others who searched for x eventually bought y” and other similar features. That’s all but gone now. You only see what is useful to Amazon for you to see.
So, my question is, where do I go to find that same general search function for shopping? It’s not google. I’m not sure it exists but it’s needed. (Or anyone have a link?)
In the UK we had shops that sold everything -- Argos has done catalogue shopping for decades. Sainsburys, a major supermarket, owns them, and does delivery.
Amazon makes it trivial to buy pretty much anything I want and get it the next day. Sainsburys sells the same stuff between themselves and argos, yet they failed miserably at competing. They could have worked with companies like royal mail and leverage their logistics expertise to compete, but they failed miserably to even realise why I shop at amazon.
I'm not some 1970s afficiando going out to a high street to buy something in person, it's very unlikely I need something right then and can't wait for 24 hours for someone to bring it to me. I have better things to do with my time.
I was at Argos between 2012 and 2013. Fresh out of university. At one point during my time there, for around five or six weeks, me and another graduate were the only front end developers on the entire Argos website. At that stage I don't think I knew the difference between margin and padding in CSS just to give you an idea of our level.
It was truly chaotic. The amount of money they wasted on Accenture consultants should be criminal. I know it's a cliche to say money is wasted on consultants, but really, no work happened. A lot of energy was expended but nothing was built or created.
I was in a newly formed "innovation hub" which had a lot of very talented people but we were blocked from doing anything by internal and external staff at every turn.
One time we tried to have a QA environment set up so that we could demo and test our work. We were told it would take _9 months_ to provision a server for us. We were a team of about 20 in expensive central London office space and we didn't have an environment to test our work. It took about 8 hours to do a deploy to production, so if something was broken the BEST CASE scenario was it would take 8 hours to fix. I never saw the best case scenario.
The most talented and motivated staff in the innovation hub slowly left after we were told that the pace of change had to be "glacial".
Argos never stood a chance of competing against Amazon.
It's not the mega conglomerates they are putting out of business. It's the bike stores, the hobby shops, the clothing boutiques. In the US with the purchase of Whole Foods, they are also moving more into groceries and everything else. After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is, and decided if I had to choose between the two I would choose the physical experience.
Once you do that you start to realize just how much of the consumer goods world Amazon has already put out of business. I live in silicon valley and there is no where I can go for electronics any more. My last amazon purchase was getting some 2.5A fuses because every store that would sell them locally has closed ( either before the pandemic, or because of it ). I tried to buy a video card, and the local computer equipment retailer literally couldn't get allocated any stock from the manufacturers, somehow Amazon managed to get first dibs on supply. I don't like that world, and I don't want to live in it.
This is really a bad example. What value do electronics shops add to a neighborhood? Maybe if you need something asap. Remember Radio Shack selling you phone chargers for $40? Do you miss them too?
I love local businesses in my neighborhood but only if they add value. Theaters, cafes, grocery shops, restaurants, book stores with cafe/events, places for kids, etc. Not an expensive electronics shop that I might visit once a year.
What there should be is a local store that stocks everything (rather than having to choose between one of 50 different specialised stores), and rather than self service from walking around the store, you simply ask the shopkeep to bring you what you want.
And then instead of having to go to that store, the shopkeep could even send someone to bring you the goods. It would be like the olden days.
> After experiencing not being able at all to go to a high street and buy things and forcing everything to be online, I realized just how bad the experience is
I have rarely been to a high street to buy stuff (rather than say a cafe or haircut) for 10 years. Imagine having to traipse somewhere, then actually walk around looking at random things on shelves hoping to find what you want?
I have been to large out of town shops like B&Q on occasion, the experience is better than a local hardware store, but still massively inferior to shopping online.
They should, but they weren't auto fuses, and Ace Hardware didn't sell them either. They were really small and specific to small electronics ( in this case a Honeywell desk fan that had a fuse in the plug ) Fry's would have had them, but Fry's is no more, and there isn't any other store like that anymore.
There's always DigiKey if you need something like that, which also happens to have a parametric search that's actually useful.
For your example, from the fuses search page (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/fuses/139) you can apply the 2.5A, fuse type "Cartridge, Glass", mounting type "Holder" and still have a wide variety of options starting at $0.25 per fuse. No free shipping though.
I've installed the apps for Argos, Curry's, Cex, John Lewis, and a few others on my phone including food, clothing and toiletries suppliers. If they don't have what I'm after then I may revert to Amazon if necessary. I'm also trying to ditch the "must buy now" impulse that Amazon has thrived on, and going to local physical shops instead.
Amazon's supply and logistics are way superior to their competitors, and their app usually is too. This does introduce a bit of friction when making the switch, including a slightly higher price sometimes. However, all in all, it's still worth doing.
It took them a while to wake up, but I think Argos is better now. You can collect from stores, get it delivered, sometimes even same-day delivery. I value having a store nearby. I trust them far more for commodity products (chargers, accessories, etc) than venturing into the Wild West of Amazon sellers and reviews. I also feel I have more recourse if something goes wrong.
20 years ago I used to spend 2 hours a week walking round a supermarket. I haven't done that for 15 years. That's 100 hours a year and 1000 miles of driving that I don't need to do.
If a lightbulb blows, I could get in the car, drive to the local shop, find one which will do (but probably not the right one), and drive home, or I could just go click-clikc and get on with the gardening safe in the knowlege that someone else will bring a replacement to me tomorrow.
These are good things. I would like an alternative to amazon (like argos or whatever), but they just don't get it. Royal mail has had an amazing delivery network throughout the UK for decades, delivering mail and parcels next day from Lerwick to Hugh Town, from a random shack on a road 30 miles from Inverness to a central London office. It's such a shame that this wasn't utilised to provide competition to amazon, because old people like the idea of a "high street" and living like the 1950s.
My wakeup moment was when I realized that Fulfill by Amazon + co-mingling means you had no idea what you got - whether it was a return, fake product of random Chinese dropship, or random other item (miscategorized).
At that point, you might as well buy from Aliexpress and cut out the middleman (for stuff you want from China).
Or drastically cut down purchases (which is what I chose).
As somebody who has purchased a lot of things from both Ali Express, there is a massive difference between Ali Express and Amazon.
To me, Ali Express is great for simple items that are practically fungible commodities, where workmanship and build quality aren't that impactful, and you can afford to wait a long time for it to arrive, and you can afford to receive some nontrivial percentages of those things and they turn out to be substandard or broken or substantially different than what was pictured. No matter the co-mingling issue, the same cannot be said of Amazon.
Amazon is turning into the fast shipping version of Ali Express. More and more fake / manipulated reviews and a sea of pseudo-English garbled brand names slapped on what looks like identical goods are making it exactly the experience you described, just shipped quicker. Ordering from Amazon is now a definite risk, and commingling is only a small part of that.
I feel like we have very different buying strategies on Amazon which is what leads to our differing opinion. I never use Amazon for product discovery. It's ... not great. I always research what I want independently and then go to Amazon to make the final purchase knowing exactly what I want. They're basically just a delivery network for me and on that front they're so far ahead of everyone else it's not even funny.
I use both modes, but I see what you're saying. (More in a minute) but suffice to say, Amazon used to be good for discovery. It isn't now...
Still, I hear you – and I get your strategy for, say, athletic shoes or a new TV or maybe even a small electric appliance for the kitchen. But what about the space where there isn't a great set of discovery resources?
For example - I needed a desk lamp recently. I didn't have a lot to spend, but I thought $30-50 should be sufficient. There isn't dominant name brand in this space, AFAIK (sure, I could go to IKEA, I guess) – but it's also not a space to find many reviews on sites like wire cutter, or some gear mag, or specialized niche community on reddit, etc. etc.
So - I gambled on a well reviewed lamp on amazon... and it died within a few months - shorting and killing USB power supplies in minutes. So, I started over - and picked a different but equally arbitrary brand in about the same price range... and we'll see. But how do I research that sort of thing? I can't afford to go through these every few months...
I keep telling myself I'm going to do this, but it becomes a huge pain in the ass. First I half to find a half dozen vendors to buy stuff from, because I like multifaceted projects, but no one else stocks all the pieces I need. Then I have to manage accounts across 6 different vendors, and put my credit card info in 6 different places.
Then once I've ordered, I have to track 6 different packages. If anything goes wrong, I have to track down which vendor, and how to contact them, and hope that they have a good policy of fixing things like this.
What we need is a replacement for Amazon. Federation could solve a lot of my pain points. Just give me an interface like Amazon that is connecting to hundreds or thousands of stores, where the orders are just dispatched to the store you ordered from. It doesn't fix shipping speeds, but it does give me:
a) a sane way to order from multiple stores
b) an easy means of tracking what I've ordered from all the stores
c) an easy way of tracking the shipping for packages I've ordered
d) a single point of entry when I know I want to buy something
Amazon cornered the market, not on prices, but on convenience. If we want them to stop being so dominant, that's where you want to kick them.
I like Amazon and online shopping; won't ditch any time soon and don't think it's important for people to do so.
The local businesses I was worried about going under were restaurants and others in the food/service industry(would lump experience in there as well; the zoo, botanical garden, museums, and etc).
The narrative I hear is that Amazon is destroying businesses. The issue I have is that this isn’t really true. Here’s an anecdote.
I drive 20 minutes to the mall. After finding parking and getting into a shoe store, there’s no one really there to help me. Once they get around to me, they don’t have my size. And it’s also apparent the person working there has no interest in helping. Whether they have my size or whether I found what I was looking for is basically not their problem. So I drive at least 40 minutes round trip, plus the hassle of parking, finding the store in the mall, and waiting on someone to help me.
Now my time is valuable. I lost my time. I paid for gas. I also put miles on my car. And depending on the day, I also had to deal with traffic.
IMO businesses refuse to compete. If Amazon is doing it better than them, then hats off to Amazon. If a business is doing better than Amazon, then I’ll go with that business.
IMO the “negative externalities” puts blame on Amazon while pretending like these other stores even try to compete.
Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing.
> Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing.
It's not.
In France it's the same thing. But the "Amazon is bad" is not really about destroying businesses (since it was done decades ago by malls, now cities are just banks, insurances and clothing crapshops like Zara) but about the fact that they are not paying taxes and they provide awful work conditions to people.
So you tend to be considered as someone who doesn't care if you buy at Amazon. (But we're still waiting for proof that companies trying to compete with Amazon don't act the same way).
People are sick and tired of Amazon deriving huge profits out of the UK market ($17.5 billion in 2019) and paying just a minuscule amount of tax on those UK sales (£6.3 million in 2019) using a mixture of clever accounting techniques (not available to other businesses) and funnelling profit out via subsidiaries in low tax jurisdictions (Luxembourg).
I don't know about you but I am also not bound to Amazon, a few years ago some stores actually started putting some work into their website, offered free shipping on order over 50$, etc... and I went back almost naturally.
These threads of Amazon-bashing always read like something out of parallel universe, I should go have a worse shopping experience because of some "greater" objective of opposing Amazon?
For me the sticking point is returns. Amazon makes it so easy to return stuff when other companies make you pay for your own shipping back that I'm way more willing to take a risk on something when it's on Amazon.
That too! I once received the wrong item from Hudson's Bay (Canadian everything store, think Sears) and not only had to physically go back to the store to get a refund because they wanted 8$ in shipping to let me send it back, they would not reimburse the shipping cost even after admitting that it was 100% their fault that they sent me the wrong item.
I don't want a future dominated by mega-corp with 99% market share but traditional retail need to get their shit together at some point.
I just buy a few sizes and return the ones that don't fit. Obviously this means I have to shop at places that offer to ship returns back for free or have a local store close I could drive to but I like the experience better than going to a store honestly.
It depends on the negative externalities. I will specifically address destroying jobs though.
In general, there is no standing in the way of progress that improves efficiency and gives consumers what they want. Interestingly, there seems to be an overlap between the crowd that says we need to hold business accountable for packaging waste and those who believe if they virtue signal hard enough Amazon will disappear and everyone will flock back to inconvenient, higher priced shopping.. Going against the general consumer demand grain typically ends up niche. But I digress.
Amazon(and other online retailers) are destroying lots of low skill jobs, but that's true for most major gains in the efficiency of producing a product. Usually this is associated with automation, but this shift touches many aspects of the logistics providing a shopping experience to consumers. This is a good thing to me as it will ultimately increase our GDP and standard of living. Resources, particular labor, are freed up to work on other stuff. Over 600k small businesses are created every year. There are millions more small business than there were a decade ago. These efficiency gains create a TON of potential.
I think that's good, so what of the net negative in raw job numbers? People without jobs. Well, weren't we at "full employment" pre-pandemic? In any case, I'm a big fan of tackling that with job re-training. We do a really poor job of that in the USA compared to other countries.
But there are a number of solutions to different negative externalities that aren't swimming upstream against consumer trends. Unionization failed but it could happen. That could help address some of the workplace issues. The government can trust bust.
I don't view this as a binary choice. Different people seem to have different pet grievances with Amazon. Some of them I agree with, some I don't(like Amazon doesn't pay taxes, which is a sound bite to me; ya basic), but generally I believe boycotting Amazon(and other online retailers) isn't really going to affect real change.
And I believe its exploitive of everyone in the supply chain, from manufacturers to delivery drivers, and has led to the vast centralization of an overwhelmingly large portion of our economy into the hands of corporation with no accountability.
Furthermore I am very convinced it makes the lives of everyone, except the tiny minority that are actively exploiting everyone else, much worse. Good jobs are lost, supply chains are made fragile, and monopolistic tendencies are encouraged. I would rather the inconvenience of shopping around than encourage a world with a private entity as the sole source of all consumer goods.
Yeah, but we are never going to stop that behavior by individuals choosing not to shop at Amazon. As an individual, my only two choices are to shop at Amazon and get the benefits and Amazon still exists, or don’t shop there and don’t get the benefits and Amazon still exists. Amazon is not going to care if they lose my business. The only person who suffers is me.
If we think Amazon business practices are immoral, we need to make them illegal.
I believe thats exactly how we stop that, by choosing not to shop at Amazon. The government is ( theoretically ) an expression of the will of the people, if the will of the people is to exploit others for their own benefit, the government will reflect that. Until we individually decide that our neighbors are important enough to us that we are willing to suffer a little inconvenience nothing will change, but if we are willing to individually suffer a little inconvenience we absolutely can effect any company even one as big as Amazon.
> The government is ( theoretically ) an expression of the will of the people, if the will of the people is to exploit others for their own benefit, the government will reflect that
There is a fundamental difference between stopping an abusive business practice with a vote verse with your wallet. With a vote, your choice is to allow the bad business practice and get the benefit of shopping there, or don't allow the business practice and don't get benefit of shopping there. The choice goes together with the consequences, good or bad.
On the other hand, choosing with your wallet doesn't couple the choice with the consequence. Even if I don't shop there, it is very likely the business will continue. Me losing the benefit of shopping there doesn't cause the business practice to stop necessarily.
Lots of people would be willing to give up shopping there if it meant the business stopped, but not if it doesn't.
And therein lies the main problem with that line of thinking in today's political landscape - when politicians are effectively funded by the large companies that have seemingly unlimited money and power, that will never happen, so where exactly will this new law come from?
My hatred of amazon came from the way they treat their employees (including developers), but especially warehouse employees!! I saw a glimpse of that on PBS documentary Timing your bathroom breaks is super fucked up! I've used them exactly 4 times this year, maybe less than 10 times last year.. Before 2020, I was spending a large part of money on this evil company! I will not use them anymore!!
You have every right not to shop there. Employees also have every right not to work there. As you will see stated here time and time again, private businesses can run their operations any way they wish as long as they are not discriminating against legally protected classes.
And yet, we have a minimum wage, maximum hours allowed to work, accident insurance, mandated sick days, mandated vacation days and other things.
If we did not mandate them by law, people could "choose" not to work at places that did not offer the above. However, that choice would probably entail "not having a job at all" which tends to be rather shitty.
My point being "it is voluntary" is not a reasonable excuse for treating lower class workers inhumanely.
That should be followed by a long discussion of what counts as "inhumane treatment". Where there is much room for disagreement still. But I don't think it is defensible to claim "they could quit" when someone else says "these conditions are inhumane and should be stopped".
My hope is that because Amazon sell everything, they sell everything really badly. You get better product descriptions, choice, help etc. on specialist stores, is my experience in Australia, although admittedly the US Amazon is probably a lot better.
I suspect this is a trend that'll continue as market buyers and sellers realize Amazon is a poor fit for certain of their activities.
I already avoid Amazon as a consumer when the brand, quality, or delivery date really counts.
But I also avoid Lowes when I'm buying appliances for tenant properties because they can't be relied upon to call before they deliver. And I don't buy from Harbor Freight Tools when equipment failure might be fatal because some things I've bought there haven't survived their first use.
But those places have saved me a ton of money over the years when their model has worked to my benefit, just like Amazon has made a vast improvement in certain areas of my life.
I suspect companies like PNC are coming to similar realizations about Amazon as they see that their returns (or the implications on their reputations, or their confidence in continued sales) paint a picture that's less attractive than pursuing alternatives.
It's so interesting to see how the pandemic hits different countries in different ways. This article talks about struggling bike shops. The truth couldn't be any more different in Germany. Bike shops were run over by customers because so many more people wanted to either go to work by bike instead of public transportation, or they had no work to do so they decided to go biking in their new spare time. Repair shops are super busy, but now there's a shortage in bike parts, too...
There was a huge run on bikes in the US. I think a number of factors were involved. Because cycling in the US is mostly recreational, the bike business is seasonal, and retailers lay in their entire years stock for delivery in the springtime. If there's a big change in demand, it can take them a year to react.
Then those bikes didn't show up because of shipping delays.
Then there was a big spike in demand, as people realized a couple of things: 1) Cycling is an outdoor activity that seems like it carries a minimal COVID risk. 2) It's a way of getting to work if you're still working but public transit is shut down. These things, together, ramped up demand for both cheap and expensive bikes simultaneously.
Shops ran out of bikes, and then it became very hard to stay in business, even if there was still demand for repairs and parts.
Bike parts have always been a problem in the US. There's too much variety for any shop to be able to maintain a decent stock, so a lot of things have to be ordered. In my own case, since I ride older bikes, it's highly tempting to order stuff from Amazon or even (preferably) eBay because of the selection. Some stuff, such as Sturmey Archer hub parts, have to be sourced from overseas.
I'm surprised about the inventory thing. I ride an 03 Cannondale road bike that uses all standard stuff— screw-in bottom bracket, band-on front derailleur, 9-speed shifters. I've always been able to get parts for it off the shelf at multiple shops, to the point that basically nothing on it is original other than the frame.
But this has even been the case with my much-weirder winter bike, my kids' bikes that have off-brand shifters, etc.
I know Sheldon Brown (RIP) catalogues a true nightmare history of incompatibilities that have built up over the years, but I think in reality, most of that stuff is pre-1990. If you have a non-imported bike purchased in the last three decades, it's going to either be Shimano or be knockoff parts that are Shimano-compatible.
> 2) It's a way of getting to work if you're still working but public transit is shut down.
Did much of public transit actually shut down? In my local city it was deemed an essential service and everyone kept working with transit still running, with a mask requirement of course.
I am not sure about the frequency of service, but buses here in London ran at a significantly reduced capacity for a while (IIRC 20 or 30 passengers per double-decker). For social distancing reasons.
Either it shut down or people were afraid to ride. They cut service drastically in my locale, still have not restored it fully. My spouse switched to her bike.
It sounds like the bike shops were struggling due to low inventory, not low demand. Anecdotally, that was the case at the bike shops near me in Chicago, which had empty shelves, but also months-long wait lists for their tuneup and repair services. Unfortunately, bike sales are a large part of their revenue.
There's long been a mismatch in the bike shop revenue model, where most of the value they add comes from labour but they charge a lot of that via markup on parts rather than directly.
I think that's basically the same situation here in the US, bike shops are super busy but the supply chain can't keep up. I also have to say that most bike shops I've visited aren't that good. They seem to have an over-supply of awkward young sales staff giving middling advice while facing an undersupply of bikes and parts. Also, the constant churn in componentry is not helping.
Bike shops in the US have been struggling since the beginning of the pandemic. Some got a slight bump with increased sales. And riders that couldn't buy new brought in old bikes for repair. Eventually, supply chain issues surfaced and you can't sell what you can't buy.
Demand was high in 2020, but bike shops (in the US) generally have poor cash flow overall. Dealers were able to clear their inventory, but there was no supply to replenish it, leaving them with empty showrooms. Even today, inventory is spotty and the wait for certain models of bikes is well into 2022.
Kerson and his team asked buyers at every retailer who stocks PNW parts to remove them from their Amazon stores too, so that everyone involved could maximize their profits and not undercut each other.
Aren't manufacturers (and branders) normally able to set the minimum advertised prices of their products, in addition to making suggestions (backed by "if you break the rules, we won't sell this to you any more") about how and where retailers can sell and advertise the product?
You can set a minimum advertised price I think. That’s why on some sites you don’t get to see the lower price until check out. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine price fixing laws still apply.
Personally I find local bike and book shops to be excellent alternatives to Amazon. For tech stuff I go to Best Buy where possible (not exactly a local shop, but at least it's still competition for Amazon). Nice to see the suppliers themselves pull out of Amazon.
I went to a manufacturer's website recently to buy something direct (cut out the middle man, better for everyone, yay!) The price was double that on Amazon. And they charged shipping. I get that bringing wearhousing in house has to cost more money, but it was just strange to see that dramatic a discount.
Agreed. They even offer free 2-day shipping just like Amazon (at least past a certain price point or something) or let you pick up in store, which I've preferred in certain cases where I want to minimize the time a fragile purchase spends shipping.
My one gripe has been that they put a huge sale sticker right on the box of the animal crossing edition switch I bought. At least it was on the side and not front and center, but it would've been nice to not do that.
Adding on to the Amazon alternative, Target is also great. I've happily purchased many electronics, home supplies, etc from them. Costco too, though they sell a different kind of inventory. Again, not quite mom and pops, but IMO anything that's not Amazon or Walmart is still an improvement.
This is fascinating and a great description to the threats facing Amazon. When you cede responsibility to Amazon that your business requires to perform adequately (in this case it seems to be the ability to match a bike to its compatible parts) than that is a risk for Amazon to lose its place as the internet’s mall if it cannot offer a way to stay relevant. If zero bike parts are available on Amazon today it might become bigger and bigger markets tomorrow, that a company like Shopify is better aligned to serve.
amusingly there's nothing particularly new here in terms of the alternatives they're exploring. i used to work in a local bike shop and thought about even doing bike parts e-commerce in the 90s. bicycles and parts have always been a high touch business. manufacturers treat local bike shops like customers, assign reps who visit to ensure merchandising standards and have strict rules regarding pricing to ensure all the shops can survive.
it amuses me to read that they're setting that up now as if it's new, as it is how it used to work for a very long time.
Define "make". Often companies are doing specifications and blueprints, but outsource the actual manufacturing to other companies. I think this would also apply to PNW, since their products (like the seatpost) are afaik not known to be just relabeled versions of other products.
+1. Their droppers are whitelabeled TransX, but the other components appear to have actually been designed by PNW and manufactured by various suppliers in Taiwan like most high quality, high volume bike parts. But they're still a business "making things" in the same way that most other companies that sell consumer products are.
I have a Loam lever, a Rainier dropper, and Range stem. They're all excellent parts with tasteful branding. PNW's customer support is excellent, when it comes time to inevitably replace a sagging dropper. The stem's bottom has an unusual design that excited some bike wizards on bikes.stackexchange when I had questions about using stems without spacers. That certainly isn't a whitelabeled, off-the-shelf component.
With the state of Amazon being what it is, I would never even have thought to look for bike parts on there. The likelihood of accidentally buying a counterfeit part is way, way too high. I buy all my bike parts direct from the manufacturer, whenever possible. PNW has a nice Shopify site, why give Amazon your money?
They started just with rebranded dropper seat posts you could buy elsewhere but made a name for themselves with excellent customer service and warranty support and reasonable prices even if you could get the same post cheaper elsewhere without the support.
Now they have engineered a few unique products you can't get elsewhere though they are all made in asia. Like they make road/gravel style drop style handle bars in uncommon widths.
Probably smart; anything you put on Amazon nowadays that gets reasonably successful will get competed out of the market by either other sellers or Amazon itself.
The main challenge is discoverability; for a lot of people, websites like Amazon is the first port of call, and people are willing to pay the convenience fee just so they don't have to scour the internet for an alternative.
That said, they now have to scour Amazon to find a decent product instead of 'knockoffs' / race-to-the-bottom competitors.
I've biked THOUSANDS of miles in the last years - growing up in Tahoe biking all through the 80s... Heck this month alone I have biked nearly 500 miles (26 miles a day, 29" mtn....
Anyway, Have you dealt with a lot of "local bike shops" -- I have dealt with too many to count.
Lets look at a few pros and cons of "local bike shops":
Pro:
-- Support a local business
-- Go in and talk to an actual person? (maybe)
Cons:
-- Many gear-head bike shop employees (specifically the mechanics) have a BOFH attitude, are gruff, rarely have time to talk - generally have an attitude.
-- Many of the local shops are now pushing bikes that are fucking $10,000 -- I looked at a bike in Mikes Bikes just last week - and it was $15,000
-- Gear selection is limited to a couple brands, and prices are no better than amazon
-- Bike shops aren't like starbucks - they are fucking far apart.
-- I have biked DAILY for over a decade. I have gotten HUNDREDS of flats - and I always carry 2 tubes with me (yes, I want to go tubeless, just havent done so yet) - getting tubes off amazon is ideal. Having to have to drive very far to go buy a tube is a non-starter
Local bike shops currently have shitty inventories because of the supply shortage from china - and to have to again drive to the bike shop to find out that their inventory is low, that the lowest end bike is $5,000 and they want to sell every garment for >$50 with stupid logos and printing all over them to show that you, the customer-turned-billboard are "serious about your biking"
-- Having to stand near too many weekend-road-warriors who really don't need anything but want to instead show you how much money they threw into their entire kit....
-- Having to deal with upsell in certain cases
-- Having to get blank stares with questions about anything outside of what the store actually sells and too many answers of "gee, I don't know"
---
Yeah, While I hate Amazon's monopoly as much as everyone -- this does NOT make all local bike shops even.
Yes, I have met some awesome ones - not not enough to where every bike shop nearest me is a good one in every single city I have loved in all over the greater bay area all the way up to Tahoe City...
I'm a cyclist of many years and am sympathetic to the plight of the small retail business, but over and over I've had even minor repairs botched by the minimum wage kids often doing the wrenching. I started buying tools and learning maintenance, because as I've said after many a trip to the shop, I could have fucked this up myself for free and saved some driving!
That's why I'd rather use Amazon/online stores to buy myself repair gear than pay hundreds per year for mountain bike maintenance. Similar cost at the beginning but much better in the long run.
I’ve biked daily for a decade too, and I’ve not had hundreds of flats. What kind of crap tires are you buying? Why would you drive to buy tubes if you have a bike?
I mean in my life of biking - I got two flats in the last two weeks - one, one a single track taking a tight turn - turns out the tube split at a seam, and was faulty. the other one was a faulty tube that literally just exploded around the fill stem... while I was standing next to my bike - almost all my tubes for a long time have been specialized...\\the good thing is most places will replace the tubes.
I have had a few bikes that would pop a tube when just riding off a six-inch curb.
I have had so many flats all on different bikes for different reasons - that my riding behavior changes when I know if I have a spare tube on me or not.
i prefer to work on my bicycle. This is both a privilege and a luxury and i recognize such. PNW components are wonderful. I shop LBS for tools and "need it today" parts. I do not find value in paying the majority of bike mechanics (ive been scraping my shins religiously for 32yrs and part of what gives me confidence in jumping them tens of feet into the arm at the ripe age of midlife). I do, however, find value in shop talk and buying the right tools / components (even if special ordered through the shops). Its a mixed bag of bolts
This doenst surprise me at all. There are more and more sellers that are frustrated with how amazon deals with them.
Amazons top priority is the customer, and thats how they got to this point, but everyone else suffers, from their 3rd party sellers to their suppliers to their own employees.
Here is a list of stuff Amazon does:
-Anti competitive behaviour on the buy box (Amazon doesnt have the product in stock. You have it, but your offer is still not shown)
-Banning sellers for no good reason, and you cant contact anyone helpful
-Screwing over their suppliers with Vendor Central, where they buy from you wholesale. They dont pay, they just say the goods were never delivered and dont accept your proof of delivery. I know sellers who are owed over 30k from amazon.
-Customers are able to send back items 1 year later. If you dont agree, they can file an “AZ claim”. If you get too manu claims, they ban you.
-Support for sellers is the worst combination of overseas call centers using some cookie cutter templates to answer questions. Often you are just copy pasting your question 5 times, until you get somebody with have a brain
-Use data from their sellers to create their own products and then force them out of the market
-creating huge incentives for chinese sellers which flood and undercut the local sellers
Its just a huge behemoth were
nobody knows whats going on.
In my opinion this company needs to be split up by gov and reigned in.
But who knows, maybe more sellers will follow suit and the pressure will be increasing to change things.
For at least one specific example - Amazon does an extremely poor job vetting products posted on its site which causes a lot of defective items to end up getting piped through it to consumers. Prioritizing your customer over everything else means delivering a high quality consistent product - which it fails to do with regular listings and fails spectacularly to do with Amazon Basics.
The customer wants cheap. They WANT Amazon to be AliExpress with fast shipping.
That’s why Amazon has free returns and they offer returns in a million different ways.
Amazon doesn’t care that it’s inefficient on resources and that these items end up in a landfill. The manufacturing cost of cheap items is so low that it’s no big deal. As long as the customer has no friction in buying or returning they are happy.
I think there are certain categories of products where many customers would actually prefer counterfeit items as long as the quality is acceptable. Just walk down a cereal aisle.
IMO you're misunderstanding this customer. The returns are pretty friction-less but they're still a burden that I'd rather not deal with - and I specifically don't want to order an electrical device off amazon and have it fail in a spectacular way that damages my other equipment.
The most luxurious thing you can tell me as a seller is that you're minimizing the longest potential time until I have a correctly functioning product - shipping is a big part of that, but not having to go through the hassle of getting it shipped out twice and returning one of them is another component.
Also I think AliExpress is a pretty terrible comparison - Amazon does beat it hand over fist. I think Amazon wants to be NewEgg but with less shipping time (and maybe the reputation it had a decade ago - it seems to be struggling lately). And it wants to be every other specialist store as well. I think it's possible for them to do this, but the thing they're lacking right now is the budget or motivation to actually vet products - they rely on peer reviews and manufacturer statements to try and suggest products.
I fully believe that your choices are logical for your own tastes. I myself don’t prefer Amazon for most things I buy for similar reasons to yours.
At the same time, I have absolutely heard multiple people say the words “if it sucks you can always return it.”
Low-friction returns are like business school 101 for retail.
I think the typical Amazon customer doesn’t shop on quality for many product categories, they are price sensitive. They don’t want to pay $50 for the Apple-certified power brick and cable.
I don’t think anyone wants to be NewEgg, if you ask me :-)
You're taking this to mean something different than the parent intended. The intended meaning is more along the lines of the old trope, "the customer is always right." This means that in any dispute between the seller and the buyer, Amazon favors the buyer 99% of the time. To the point that it's incredibly easy (and common) to be a hobbyist Amazon scammer as long as you stick to scamming marketplace sellers instead of Amazon itself.
Amazon follows a core set of Leadership Principles (LPs) that we Amazonians aspire to every day. They are ingrained in our culture, and they guide the behaviors we value. It’s very telling that the first LP is Customer Obsession—leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Because you’re focusing on small but visible details that are hard unsolved problems for a company that’s Amazon’s size.
If you have the solution to any of these problems you would have a genuinely game-changing business and would be a 100M company selling it to every online marketplace.
Alternatively, you can try to do both. If this issue was systemic, I imagine it would pose a systemic risk to Amazons business? Presumably it isn’t a systemic issue.
(I don’t work in Amazon retail so I don’t know, but I’m trying to frame this logically from a business sense).
These are not small details to be dismissed flippantly. Counterfeits and tainted listings are dangerous, especially considering how many health-related products are sold on Amazon.
Another one: inventory pooling. When a product is “fulfilled by Amazon,” it comes from warehouse stock. However this stock can be contributed to by all sorts of sellers, legit or counterfeit. So sometimes buyers will receive a knockoff when they purchased a legitimate product. I have a relative who designs and sells electronics accessories, and he said this is a serious problem he runs into when selling on Amazon.
This is one of the things they do that could be spun as "pro seller".
As a consumer, I don't like buying from vendors that I can't verify how much I trust them.
So "fulfilled by Amazon" convinces consumers to buy with confidence, and even a no-name seller can get sales without having to compete on reputation.
This means that consumers actually can't trust where they are buying from.
It's also pro-consumer since it means that you get your order faster. Instead of sending you the widget that was warehoused across the country by your seller, they can sell you the one that was warehoused near your house by a different seller.
(in theory they could always just ship it across the country, but then they'll have to raise shipping prices)
Mingling counterfeit products with genuine products is a problem, but since I rarely know Amazon merchants, I'm not sure that's considerably worse than not mingling at all, I could just as likely try to buy from a merchant that's selling counterfeits.
>>> -creating huge incentives for chinese sellers which flood and undercut the local sellers
In my view, another way of looking at it is that selling on Amazon favors sellers who can figure out how to manage those risks, and one way of doing it is to be basically a "fly by night" business. If you can spin up multiple sellers, make your nut on the first sale, and pull the plug on the seller if anything goes wrong, you've got what it takes.
Or, if your margins are high enough that you can afford to eat the bad sales.
As a long-time customer (since the late 90's) I am also frustrated with Amazon these days because it's now impossible to judge the quality of the products as the website is swamped with cheap asian knock-off products, fake brands and fake reviews. It feels like 2/3 of all items are Aliexpress offers, just more expensive. It's probably a good window of opportunity for a competitor with some minimum quality guarantees and otherwise similar functionality.
>In my opinion this company needs to be split up by gov and reigned in.
I think there are a lot of things Amazon can do better, but your solution is interesting.
“I am not happy with Amazon. The company should be broken up by the government.”
If everything you stated is absolutely true and systemic issues, IMO let the market and consumers punish Amazon.
It sounds like you’re saying Amazon is good enough that it’s impossible to take away their customer base. On the other hand, you’re describing what seems to be a completely broken company not worth a minute of my time.
>> Banning sellers for no good reason, and you cant contact anyone helpful.
I must be getting old.
How did these companies get so massive without any meaningful customer service departments? Amazon, Google, Facebook and many, many others where customer service is not even bothered with, yet people continue to use their products and services.
How did these companies get so massive without any meaningful customer service departments? Amazon, Google, Facebook and many, many others where customer service is not even bothered with, yet people continue to use their products and services.
As a customer, I've had no trouble reaching Amazon customer service when I need help, and they've always been helpful - refunding or replacing the defective product.
As a customer, I only needed customer service from them once (in the over 10 years I've been buying from them). My experience was truly terrible, and I ended up losing my money.
It's because they make it super easy for the customer, but use dark patterns for the sellers. Amazon can afford to lose sellers since more are popping up everyday and willing to sell items for a loss to gain market share.
The parent also didn't mention that Amazon has a policy of not allowing sellers to sell their products for a lower price on their own website. If only customers knew how much Amazon is screwing over sellers, they would be wary. Many sellers I know themselves don't shop on Amazon themselves due to this.
Agreed - Amazon knows who their real customers are and they have leverage over the sellers.
It does surprise me though that given that there's a lot of counterfeit junk and scam-like sellers on the site (which is a pretty bad customer experience). You'd think they'd shut that down.
In practice it doesn't matter because prime shipping is so much better than any non-amazon option I just deal with that risk (with some exceptions where I'll buy directly from the creator of the product).
> In practice it doesn't matter because prime shipping is so much better than any non-amazon option I just deal with that risk
Really? I'm strongly considering canceling my prime subscription specifically because shipping has gotten so awful. Amazon won't even allow you to select a shipping speed anymore. Pretty much everywhere else on the internet is better.
- Ordered a blanket directly from the blanket maker's website, order details were delayed, no shipping notice, no out of stock notice, order took 4 months to arrive (it was supposed to be a gift).
- Ordered some flatware from MOMA was charged and no shipping details updated, I waited six weeks before emailing them - they said the system 'lost the order' I had to have paypal reverse the charges.
There are other examples, but generally non-amazon sucks - even in the best of cases it's twice as long and usually expensive.
With Amazon I often get two day, next day, or even same day shipping for free. Packages arrive typically well packaged and undamaged and the tracking is really good. If there are any issues they are quick to resolve it.
> Packages arrive typically well packaged and undamaged
That's another thing. Amazon used to ship things in boxes with appropriate padding. Now they're shipping books in manila envelopes, with predictable damage to the book from the tightness of the envelope.
You do sound like my parents. They were mainframe programmers in the 70s and still every time I complain about wierd issues I'm having with programming, they'll keep asking me if I've called tech support.
They can't wrap their head around how you can have useful-ish software with shitty incomplete out of date documentation and tech support via people competing to get noticed on StackOverflow for their resume.
The more time goes on, I'm not sure I can wrap my head around it either...
The retail customers who end up buying the stuff are lavishly treated.
The small businesses which sell their products on Amazon are not really 'customers' and are treated like 5th class citizens.
Proof and burden rests on these suppliers shoulders.
> After leaving his job in global business development at Amazon, Aaron Kerson used his knowledge of the platform’s sales algorithms to power up his new business.
Don't corporations typically have non-compete clauses to prevent an employee from exploiting proprietary knowledge they gained while working for the firm? Would we be supportive of someone who left (e.g.) a small bicycle parts company to help Amazon rule that market?
Yes...
(not a lawyer so grain of salt here)
There are three basic tools for IP protection:
1) Copyright - protects outright copying of an IP asset
2) Patent - protects against the reimplementation of the same IP
3) Trade Secret - Similar to patent, but enforcement is trickier especially for software as you have to demonstrate a benefit to it being secret as well as your efforts to keep it secret.
Non-competes are more of a blunt instrument and a controversial topic. Amazon is infamous for having them. Typically only hear of companies trying to enforce these at executive level as any enforcement at a lower level can impact recruiting heavily.
In the bike-parts and other speciality manufacturing businesses, there's a fourth barrier to entry for new competitors: reputation for quality.
Quality matters a whole lot for the kind of products PNW makes. Not every cyclist has the ability to figure out whether a part was manufactured correctly (no cracks or voids in castings, etc etc).
Maybe they outsource them. But finding contract manufacturers who do a good job is a highly skilled business.
And cyclists depend on stuff like this to work. I once had the top of a cheapo seatpost break off on a road bike, in the late fall, far from home. Cheezy metal manufacturing. Cold couple of hours waiting for a rescue. Happily I didn't crash.
I learned my lesson. Now I buy stuff from my local bike shop, or sometimes REI if I'm far from home. The possibility of counterfeit parts is frightening. I know I can trust the local bike shop to source decent parts.
When he started the company in 2015, presumably he wasn't competing with Amazon (by selling products on their platform that they don't have their own brand of). By now, I'd assume any non-compete that might cover "don't sell products that compete with us" have expired.
If these are the growing pains of a "bike economy" this would be a good thing. In large parts of the world bikes could and should become the first choice for mobility and there needs to be a healthy ecosystem to support this transition. From (more) local manufacturing, to distribution, servicing, upgrading and eventually recycling(pun).
Amazon for bikes or bike parts? I don't understand this, it must be a US thing.
Here in Europe, Amazon would be the last place I would go to buy anything bike related. We have _specialized_ large online retailers, like CRC in NI and Bike24 in Germany who are excellent, also tend to ship the same day and actually do care about their customers...
fact of the matter is... if you are a cyclist, amazon is definitely not the place to look for bike parts. sadly, all the SEO spammers only advertise amazon affiliate links so you'd think amazon sells decent bike parts, but you'd be wrong. IMHO google should ban any website heavily linking to amazon affiliate program.
I was considering to use Amazon Fulfillment for Summon The JSON decks. However, it occurred to be very expensive. My customers are fine to wait a couple of days. They can also choose fast manufacturing, to get decks faster. I don't fell I miss anything by not selling or fulfilling by Amazon.
Bicycles are not toys. They are vehicles that need maintenance. You can do much of that maintenance yourself if you're a nerd, but the vast majority of cyclists are dependent on local bike shops to sustain the cycling community.
The bicycle/parts manufacturers need a large cycling community to sell products to. The large cycling community will have novice and intermediate cyclists that will abandon cycling if their bikes break down. 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. Thus, the major bicycle manufacturers need to give a oligopoly status to the local bike shops in order to keep their user base large.
As a life long cyclist, I've seen the industry grow and wane, and throughout it all, I've seen the vast majority of people think bicycles are some type of sports-equipment. Decisions like this are one of only a few business models that I can see sustaining the community. I'm actually surprised and optimistic to see the major manufacturer Trek start building their own brick and mortar shops in certain major cities, though I'd prefer to see this happen through a major cooperative between the various brands. If you care about making cycling a serious, sustainable transit alternative, we need to maintain the entire ecosystem of ridership, which means the race to the bottom on amazon must be stopped.