Endless weekend

 We've reached the part of summer where every day feels like Saturday. Saturday doesn't mean the same thing in a bike shop as it does in the normal world, especially in a resort town. Saturday is peak intensity, the opposite of a day of leisure.

A particular day might seem like a slow Saturday or a busy one, but any summer day can bring in a sudden crowd of people with the day off, looking for something fun to do. It's a very different pattern from winter's ski business, in which the peaks are solidly on the weekends, or on designated short vacation periods.

Particularly now, in the Summer of Denial, a population restless after a lost year is ready to push the limits of safety and gather with their naked faces, as case numbers spike in some regions and crawl gradually higher in others. Our particular part of New Hampshire has notched up to Moderate, while an adjacent county has reached Substantial transmission. We're seeing more masks, and wearing our own again much more of the time, but it's not general. 

Last week, a local man came in for some repair work. In conversation it emerged that he had never masked and he refuses the vaccine. He told us that all you need is hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, and that masks clearly don't work because the guidance on them has not been consistent from day one. He is always affable, even when he can see that we disagree completely with his position. He's the same guy who wouldn't buy a Fuji Wendigo fat bike because it was named for a demon and he believes in God. And yet his regard for the gentle savior does not extend to such small gestures as wearing a face mask. He's a member of the Superspreader Church of Christ, down the street, where they gathered throughout the early rise of the pandemic until they spawned their very own cluster.

The shop remains shorthanded. It's always hard to find competent help, because we need someone smart enough to do the work and dumb enough to do it for a living. Failing that, we at least need someone who can show up on a regular basis and perform many of the basic mechanical tasks that confront us. We have no new bikes to sell, but repair demand is still high. Parts can be hard to get, but enough come through to keep us going. We're getting killed on freight, because we have to pounce on things as soon as they are available, rather than waiting to fill out larger orders at longer intervals.