Fat tip or the price of my soul?

I spent the first couple of days last week putting together a $10,000 mountain bike for a young man who wanted to have one here where he summers rather than transport the one he has already where he spends the rest of the year.

Let that sink in.

Among his few and mild requests, he wanted it set up with the tubeless tire option. It comes with the stems and other widgets, and the tires are designed to work that way. It requires a bit of extra labor to remove the casings, take out the tubes installed at the factory, and install the special spoke hole plugs and tubeless valve stem. Oh, and there's this rim strip that you might or might not need. The instructions are ambiguous on that point, and the internet is full of completely contradictory advice.

Being a belt and suspenders kind of guy, I went for the option that uses plugs and rim strip. After the usual wrestling match to get the tires back on, all I had to do was pour in the sealant, pop on the last bit of bead, and blast the tires into place with the compressor. On every setup I've done with all new components, this has been a quick and simple matter. Move deliberately so as not to dump sealant all over the place, and it should go smoothly.

This time, the beads just did not want to catch. When I finally got that sorted, there was a lot of leakage. It wasn't seeping from any of the usual suspects. The valve stems weren't seating properly.

When trying to make a rim and tire combination airtight without an airtight inner tube to bear that burden, the numerous holes that naturally plague a bicycle wheel all need to be blocked somehow. Standard methods evolved using rim tape, and valve stems with o-rings, but good enough is never good enough for the pathologically innovative. When your company slogan is Innovate to Death, you are obligated to mess with things, even when the previous system was completely satisfactory.

A $10,000 mountain bike symbolizes the decadence of the bike industry. To be fair, the base price was only $9,920.00, but the customer decided to put on $180 pedals in place of the cheapo plastic ones that come standard with most bikes. Because a rider still has multiple options for pedals, most manufacturers (maybe all, I haven't checked) put on something that costs them pennies, rather than try to anoint a winner by installing a specific brand and type that would require a specific proprietary cleat.

Ten thousand dollars. Carbon fiber frame. Full suspension, of course, with sophisticated embellishments requiring extra tubing and pressure chambers just waiting for future failure and servicing.

A bike like this is designed to provide a few seasons of hardcore fun and then be cast aside for the next marvel. If you're in the $10,000 mountain bike bracket, that makes perfect sense. You do the same thing with your $80,000 (or more) car, and any other up-to-the-minute devices that you basically lease from the purveyors of such trinkets. You run a revolving account with the faceless, blameless conveyor belt of obsolescence, to keep getting what you deserve as a power player in the economy.

The customer himself was extremely affable, charming, and at times quite funny. I wonder how he is when things aren't going his way. I suppose it depends on who is giving him the turbulence. If it's a superior in the economic hierarchy, he has to suck it up. This time, his money flowed toward us and he received a product and service in return. He expressed his appreciation numerous times, and even said he owed me a generous tip for my extra labors getting the tires to behave. He said that when I was still working on them.  He wouldn't be getting the bike for another 24 hours. I smiled and said something generally pleasant and gave it no further thought.

The tires finally held pressure the next morning, so I let him know he could take the bike and start shaking it down. Sometimes a build is good for months of use right off the stand with only the most minor of follow-up, like crank arm bolts and maybe a tweak to a cable or two. A mountain bike usually faces a rougher inauguration than a road or path bike, so it might need more attention. On the plus side, this particular customer is willing and able to dial in his own suspension preferences and other personalization without professional help.

The launch of this bike fits interestingly with the services I recently performed for another customer on similar expensive full suspension bikes from about 2012 and 2016. The earlier bike had a leaky fork that had been abandoned by its manufacturer, so the customer had to buy a whole new fork. His final tally for all services on that bike was about $1,200. The newer bike only needed suspension pivots rebuilt, and some attention to the headset, for a total just north of $300. The manufacturers aren't just giving away those bolt and bearing kits. Actual removal and installation takes hours. How many hours depends on how tenaciously some of the bearings might be rusted into place. As I assembled the $10,000 mountain bike I imagined its future needs. Would its owner bother to have it rebuilt like that, or would he unload it and trade up? How different might our world be by the time the bike needs that kind of service? This year we're seeing how rapidly everyone's lives can change.

Are you still thinking about the tip mentioned in the title? I wasn't. I'm always a little on edge around wealthy customers, because they have expectations based on their power, but those expectations vary, and are frequently not expressed directly. We're left to guess who really wants to be treated like just another regular person and who wants some degree of fawning and groveling.

I'm really bad at fawning and groveling. I don't get all rebellious and defiant, I just totally forget to fawn and grovel. All jobs are equal on the workstand. The bikes aren't equal. Some of them are pretty horrendous. But once the machine is clamped in the stand it becomes the focus of attention until it is working as well as time, budget, and its original condition allow. And then it's off. Next!

I forget what I was buried in when $10,000 mountain bike guy came to pick it up. I turned my attention to him to run through what I had done to get the tires to behave, and make sure that he was all set to take on the next phase. He was profuse in his thanks, and proffered a folded banknote. I took it, but did not scrutinize it except to note that it was fairly colorful. I mentally reviewed American currency designs. It was definitely bigger than a ten. Tipping is fairly rare in the bike business, and the denominations tend to be small, in the realm of a bit of coffee money. Meanwhile, we were still running through what he was going to do next and whether he needed any parts or tools he had not already purchased. I forgot about the folded bill until the end of the day when I was packing up to head home.

It was a hundred.

My first feeling was uneasiness. The biggest cash tip I'd ever received here was a twenty. Usually it's a five or a ten if anything. Sometimes a gift card to the coffee shop. Staring at a Benjamin, I wondered what was now expected in return. Instant top priority? Step aside, peasants! Or was it truly just a casual gift of gratitude from someone whose personal economy considers a hundred dollars to be merely a nice gesture?

One hundred dollars is only one percent of the price of the bike as delivered. If the ten grand had been a restaurant tab, the tip would have been at least $1,500, and the purchased meal would turn into a bowel movement within 24 hours. But a server at table provides much more continuous personal service. The server at a high end eating establishment is a performer, enhancing the experience.

I'm not going to complain about an unexpected $100 dropping on me. The septic system at my house is pretty ancient, I'm having the top of the older chimney replaced because its crumbling masonry is letting water in, three cords of firewood will soon arrive in my driveway, the property taxes are due, the car needs registration, inspection, and probably other work, and the "tax cuts" have left my household facing another chunky federal income tax bill despite increasing our withholding to try to avoid the same circumstance that blindsided so many people last year at tax time. El Queso Grande said I should spend it on something fun, but where's the fun in letting debt accrue and your house rot? Not much seems fun to me anyway. The things that still raise a flicker of enjoyment either use things I already own or would require a great deal more than $100 and the time I have available. Groceries alone cost a lot more than they used to.

The other thing that occurred to me immediately was to donate the $100 in various size allotments to several worthy causes.

Are there shops where a $100 tip is not unusual? In places more heavily populated with people in the $10,000 bike bracket, is $100 the new $20? I mean, $50 seems so half-assed.

The whole concept of tipping is kind of weird. We're accustomed to it in certain service settings, most notably restaurants and other food and beverage venues. We tip hair stylists, housekeepers, bartenders, cab drivers, some delivery people. As a bike mechanic, I consider myself skilled and professional. You don't see people tipping their doctor, do you? "Great job on the appendix, Doc! Here, have a car!"

Many professionals  -- like plumbers -- charge so much that no one would consider laying an additional cash bonus on them. Perhaps bike mechanics invite the largesse because we're so obviously clinging to the tattered bottom fringe of the middle class. Either that or stretching our arms upward from the sucking mud of the working poor. Our profession has never reached the stature of auto repair, in which every poor striver with a crapbox car still has to find and pay a well-equipped professional to keep that junker on the road. Maybe the auto mechanic isn't doing any better financially, because the overhead for tools and facilities eats up a lot of the gross receipts, but how often do you walk away from a car repair paying less than an amount that would send your average bike repair customer into screaming fits? In addition, because we don't look like skilled workers -- it's just a bicycle -- no one risks insulting our professionalism by offering the very occasional gratuity. It puts us on a par with the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets and carry trays of food to tables more plain than fancy.

Am I expected to touch my forelock and know my place? Will the relationship be defined by whether a particular benefactor wants to cultivate the common touch or make the stratification more obvious? They depend on us, but do they value us?

Sometimes we have to bid against each other to earn the trade. For instance, when there was another shop in town, a notorious low bidder, we never saw a certain well-known wealthy businessman with a career in politics. He went to the low bidder until the low bidder went under. Now he comes to us. When he does, he's kind of a regular guy. He's just a regular guy with hundreds of millions of dollars, who appears in the news as a major elected official. If another low bidder opened up, would he vanish again? The only factor in our favor is that you would have to be a complete delusional idiot to go into the bike business these days, COVID-19 bike boom notwithstanding. But the news of the surge in bike business has created the mistaken impression in the viewing public that bike shops are raking in the coin. Might someone with a small bankroll and grand dreams think that this is the time to jump in? Stupider things have happened.

Unless you happen to be among the powerful, success depends on negotiating a balance between the service you offer and the attitude you can get away with. That's life for the vast majority of us whether we realize it or not.