I'm cleaning up e-bikes for a very wealthy customer. They need parts replaced because of careless maintenance and poor storage. I was told by their property caretaker that the bikes are fairly new. The parts aren't worn. They're corroded. Brake rotors deeply pitted. Aluminum parts beginning to bubble their paint as white blisters of oxide form underneath it. Chains rusted to rebar.
As the bike industry has suffered shrinkage that was largely self-induced, merging with economic setbacks related to the pandemic, and end-stage capitalism in general, I have less and less patience for the rich and feckless who don't have respect and care for their toys. I compare these bikes to that of a worker who literally rode his ebike to pieces, using it as transportation through the New England winter. I resent the grimy task of trying to remedy rich people's neglect. I will charge them. They will pay. They always have. But, while we wait for parts, their 50-pound pigs are cluttering up the shop's limited storage space.
They waste equipment because they can: a trivial write-off that they excuse because they can afford it. They're creating jobs. But they're also wasting manufactured objects that may be in short supply. They're spitting on the labor that went into making their bikes in the first place -- labor that they wasted by taking crappy care of machines that someone else might have wanted and been able to put to good use.
The brake rotors they need are not in stock right now at our supplier. I will piece together something out of our stock, just to get the bikes out of our way, but that means that anyone who shows up right afterward, while we're still waiting for replacement stock, will not get a quick turnaround, even if they depend on their bike to get them to their subsistence job.
Two of the mounting bolts of the rear brake rotor on one of the bikes are rusted into the hub. The hub is the motor housing. The rotor is heavily rusted. Worst case, they have to buy a whole wheel because the bolts won't come out, but can't be trusted to stay in after all of the efforts to remove them. Drilling them out would require perfect precision to remove only the old bolt without damaging the bolt hole. If threads needed to be repaired, it would require a skilled machine shop, not just a hand tap, because the holes are shallow and blind.
This isn't a metaphor for the destructiveness of wealth. It's a flat-out demonstration of it. The attitude became prevalent in the 1980s, as we accelerated away from the early surge of the environmental movement and our flirtation with social consciousness based around the gains of the civil rights and women's movements, and the anti-war sentiments stimulated by the Vietnam War. The pursuit of personal wealth became the main focus of society. The sole measure of whether you should do something was whether you could pay for it. You didn't even need the money, as long as you could get the credit approved. That, incidentally, is why the economy collapsed at the end of the decade, ushering in the 1990s on a recession. Eventually you run out of places to transfer your balance, and actually have to pay something.
Economy is hard. We have unemployment when more people need jobs than jobs need people. We make poor provisions for the players on the bench, because we tend not to think of them as such. We just hope they're still alive and functional when we need to put them in the game. An actual pro team pays those reserves. Not the free market, though. Social safety nets are stigmatized. Employers know that people are busily manufacturing more people, so someone will be around for the next call-up. Industrialization views people as interchangeable parts. Life is cheap and individuals are common.
The winners in the economy take what they want of land, possessions, experiences, and delegate as much as possible of the grubby chores. Their contribution to the economy consists of the money they didn't pay to some laborers, redirected to as little as they can get away with paying to selected other laborers. What are their actual job skills, and why are they worth that much to the rest of us? It's an honest question.
I value real services provided by people who might not have to exert much or get physically dirty in the course of a work day. I can still ask what's fair on a basis other than "whatever the market will bear." The market is driven by marketing. What if things we've been conditioned to condone as lucrative are complete bullshit? I'll bet you can think of a few. I know I can. But only an impossibly detailed audit could disclose all of them and devise a genuinely fair pay scale.
Down here in the middle and lower reaches of the current income scale, we tend to hire each other to do things for which we personally don't have the tools and knowledge. Pure self sufficiency is a myth. It doesn't even exist at the level of photosynthesis. All of life depends on some kind of external input. The higher you go on the income scale, the more you find people who can delegate everything, providing only money and demanding satisfaction.
The level of demand varies widely. People with only one billion dollars look up the steep face of the mountain above them to the lofty heights where the multi-billionaires live and feel like they're one of us little people. Billionaires are people too. They're just as capable of expressing appreciation, even as some scrabbling dubs can be real jerks about paying for services rendered. I could tell you stories... But even as I recall a few, I realize that they're based on a sense of economic asymmetry. We were the richie rich bike shop in the richie rich lakeside town, and the customer was a hardworking dirt digger from that place between the luxury of the lakeshore and the tourist dollars of the mountains: a no-man's land where even the glaciers just dropped their junk and left all life to fend as best it could on scraped rock, gravel, and sand.
This particular time presents a new level of challenge, with the economic policies of the current regime and the unrest associated with the threat posed by their authoritarian governing style. The bike business already suffered from a number of ongoing forces bent on squeezing us into a smaller and smaller social and economic space. Biking in general suffered from the industry's attempts to create consumer dependency. Now all of those struggles wiggle through the obstacles presented by a drop in tourism, and reduced spending by consumers in general.
We still see people who seem oblivious to the instability. Consumer confidence is supposedly low, but some of the individual consumers who show up to spend seem almost dangerously manic. By and large, people buying things ask the same questions that they always have. Buying a bike, they ask about its features and benefits. Getting a bike repaired, they ask if it's worth fixing, and how much it will cost. They're little islands of normality scattered through days where hours pass without a phone call or a customer coming in. It's in those hours and silences that we see the effects of uncertainty.
Repairs are trickling in. Usually they flood as soon as the weather gets warm. The warmth has not come on in a steady rise, but the waves of chill are shorter and more above freezing. It's been years since we had a "normal" bike season. Those years depended on circumstances that will never be repeated. So we feel our way. We try to be ready for customer needs...and wants...
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