Cycling's Inferiority Complex

 Way back in 1980 at my first shop job I learned very quickly that I had no skills with customers. A couple of people brought in a very rusty old bike and asked for an estimate. I started going through all of the things that it needed to be in its best possible shape. Their brows furrowed. Chins might have quivered. They wavered between crushing disappointment and rising outrage. The manager, a bike shop veteran for many years, stepped in and provided the lowball, bare minimum estimate to get the bike functional but still decrepit. They were immediately charmed. I shriveled away like a vanquished demon.

The manager operated under the principle that some money was better than no money. Not every bike can be saved from abuse and neglect. I was always trying to get people to love their bikes and get hooked on the good stuff. Every person who worked at the shop was doing it at least in part for the discounts. On the retail side, a quick discount could turn a browser into a buyer, or a buyer into a loyal customer.

Avid bicyclists are always trying to get friends into it. Worse yet, we try to get romantic partners into it. That works about 0.0000312 percent of the time. The fact that it works at all, however rarely, keeps poor idiots trying, year after year. In a broader sense, the bike industry, bike retailers, and cycling organizations are all trying to win friends. C'mon! Try it! We know you'll love it, no matter how much you hated it the first (dozen) times you tried it!

In the 1970s, the bike shops I frequented all seemed to have the same welcoming attitude. Paradoxically, shops have developed the image of being snotty and condescending just because of the inescapable technical complexity of the deceptively simple machines, and the fact that we do try to establish dominance over anyone who appears to be challenging us. But our public image always fights against the perception that our machines must be stupidly simple because they don't have motors.

As I think of it, some bike people can be really caustic bastards. But even that stems from the inferiority complex. Genuinely strong and secure people don't have to be assholes. That doesn't mean that every insecure person is an asshole, only that the truly great are always truly good. Some insecure people are sycophantic grovelers or codependent people pleasers.

Then there's financial insecurity. I returned to the bike business just before the market exploded in the feeding frenzy of the 1990s. Money was pouring into the industry, but individual shops had to battle furiously to make sure that enough of it came to them. Lots of players went into the retail side. Price competition was brutal. One chain in Connecticut put all of its competitors out of business by price matching and giving free service for life. We pored over their ads and press releases, trying to find how they were faking it, but they weren't. Supposedly, they also paid their mechanics fairly well, as bike shop wages go. I don't know if it was a calculated strategy of long-term loss or if they had income that wasn't obvious, but they did prevail in the long run.

"We'll pay you to be our friend" has worked in many forms in the bike business for many years. I can't count all the times I totaled up a repair bill, realized that it would lead to a lot of nasty words, and planed off what I could to avoid the hassle. A classic case occurred this week, when I redid work on a bike that the other technician had misdiagnosed, and altered the bill to reflect what the customer had asked for and what was actually done. I removed parts that had been installed in error, but performed adjustments that had been left undone, so the total bill was slightly higher than it had been with the unnecessary parts. I noticed later that the shop owner had written a completely new ticket, discounting my labor to get the price below a maximum that had not been included on the original ticket. If I'd known that the customer had an upper limit, I would have done the discount myself. It's not only an example of how bike shops have to eat sh** just because customers don't value either their bikes or our services, but also of poor internal communication in the shop itself. You get used to being insulted in this business.

I might be able to recall every one of the few times that I've held the line on a big bill and had to deal with an ugly scene. Some people specialize in ugly scenes just to get that discount. When we identify those customers, we give them a farewell party at which we actually get paid one time for the work we put in. Then we stand in the flames of their wrath as they pay that final bill and darken our door no more. It's happy-sad. It's a shame to think about how they're going to badmouth us afterwards, but a great relief to have one less thing feeding our ulcers.

Over time, the constant need to overcome the lowball image leads to feelings of guilt over legitimate prices. I know that even the simple old equipment can't endure ignorant and uncaring technicians. You pick up all kinds of little details over years of doing the work. I also know that I wasted my earning life in a stupid job that would never in any market area pay any sensible adult enough to justify spending those years. I'm a special kind of idiot. The fact that I'm not living in a single grubby room or squatting in a tent on the back of somebody's woodlot is due entirely to luck. My life is a series of accidents. I still assert that a mere bike mechanic is worthy of respect and a comfortably livable rate of pay. Take a break here to explore for yourself the wildly divergent economies in different regions of the country and parts of the globe... I have imagined myself squatting in front of a shelter made of scrap wood and tin roofing, facing onto an unpaved street in a crowded city in the Global South.

A precarious existence in a privileged society can look very cushy compared to one where everything is more obviously subject to capricious destructive forces. Our shop here in Resort Town is heated in winter, cooled in summer, has indoor plumbing, and everyone old enough to drive has managed to obtain and support an automobile. But income depends on the public's recreational interests from year to year, in activities that have seen mostly downward trends. Those trends were interrupted during Covid, when the public suddenly had time and interest, and the business had nothing to sell them. The slump resumed as the economy recovered.

Participants in any sector of the bike world can't believe that the outlook overall is weak, because they are immersed in their chosen aspect of it. The mountain bikers are convinced that the boom is still booming. E-bike riders see plenty of their own kind, especially in more densely populated areas where support is more available.

DIY videos and helpful friends with a workshop in the back of their saloon take the place of the rival shops that forced each other to live on suicide margins and give more for less. The technolemmings who buy into the notion that every change is progress have no patience with another point of view. We're free to have the point of view. They just won't be around to listen to it. When anyone does bring in their mountain bike these days, I wonder why. Gone are the days when I was the go-to problem solver in this town. The industry has specialized in producing problems faster than I can keep up with them. Mountain bikes have replaced one set of vulnerabilities with another, much more frustrating set. Parts and labor cost more, but the potential unreliability in the outcome makes me nervous about charging what we should. But that's just when dealing with the already addicted. The general public has the same dismissive view of bikes and biking that they've had since at least the 1950s. Muscle cars would always be way cooler than muscle-powered vehicles. Loud noise! Cloud of smoke! Flashy paint job! Back seat you can get laid in! We were never going to beat that.