Long before I arrived, the shop where I work opened in 1972 with a few simple tools. The bike side started as a way to generate summer income in a business primarily focused on cross-country skiing.
They picked a great time to go into both of those markets. As the shop grew, the owners were able to amass more tools, both new and by purchasing at the liquidation of one or more bike shops that went out of business in the region. They never had the legendary Campagnolo tool chest, but they had a lot of classic tools by the time I showed up in 1989.
Remembering a few items that were extremely useful in my first shop job, I introduced them to the lineup. Most frames were still made of steel in 1989 and into the 1990s, so frame prep tools were a sensible investment to increase our capability in the competitive business environment of the mountain bike boom. We started keeping an annual wish list of tools to add.
When suspension forks became standard, we tooled up to service them. But that's when the math got more complicated. Suspension designs evolved rapidly. The tool kits to service each generation changed as well. Now we had to consider how many jobs we could bill for, to offset the prestige of being able to do them at all. We could easily spend a few hundred bucks to work on something that consumers and industry would quickly abandon for the newer and better model. Some of the tools might still apply, but designers were looking ahead much more than considering backwards compatibility in anything.
For the latter part of the 1990s, with threadless headsets now the standard, and fork designs changing every year, it made more sense for consumers and for us to have them buy a closeout fork that was newer than the one they had worn out, but not the latest greatest for the typical high introductory price. We could install a threadless fork for cheap money. They might pay more than an overhaul cost, but they would have a better fork. Every single customer went for it.
Before the internet, we competed with mail order. Customers would come in with their catalogs and ask us to match prices. Sometimes we could, but often we could not. We might get them to buy what we had because we had it, so they didn't have to wait for shipping and pay that extra cost. Sometimes we would tell a customer that we would match the mail order price but they couldn't have the product for five days. Pay now and wait, just like they would have to wait for delivery of their bargain purchase. Mail order places that gave free shipping put more pressure on us, as do the internet vendors today. A huge amount of retail has gone online, where big retailers seem to be feeding upstream from wholesalers, putting pressure on the whole supply chain for in-person shops like ours. The online stores can low-ball pricing and still make their margin, while wholesalers can't offer low enough prices to make in-person pricing competitive.
Service can't be automated. Maintenance and repair takes a human with knowledge, spending time and using tools. But tools and knowledge come at a cost.
As bike tech mutated through the 1990s, a lot of service was still intuitive. You could look at a mechanism and figure out how it came apart and went back together. Shimano led the way making inaccessible components, followed by Fox shocks that had scary labels warning that you were basically holding a hand grenade, but the progress to our current state of technological paralysis was gradual. We sidestepped the suspension service side until mountain biking suddenly died in its tracks shortly after the turn of the century. And it really did. Around here, it went from the thing everyone was doing, almost every day, to almost nothing. The remaining regular riders switched to road biking for perhaps as much as a decade, but even there the numbers overall were lower as the prices crept higher and motor traffic steadily increased.
Road bike tech evolved more slowly than mountain bike tech. And in areas of the country where mountain biking hadn't died back as dramatically, the machines were mutating wildly, seeking the motorcyle-esque configuration that they have now. When some demand suddenly returned, we'd had no financial incentive to be ready for it.
When the mountain bike boom began, it built on the frugality of the ten-speed boom that had preceded it. One of biking's great appeals was that it was cheap fun. Buy the bike. Get some clothes and shoes if you want to get that much further into it. But then you just have to keep up with routine expenses like tires, chains,, lube... You could do a lot of riding for a little money, and have the rest of your cash left over for the delicious food that fuels your travels. Early mountain bikes started out as cheap beaters. Off-road riding was just kind of a hoot, a side line. When it seized the public consciousness and took off, the bikes were still made on the principles of the ten-speed era: solid, as affordable as possible, and marketed as fun and practical at the same time.
"Practical" went in the dumpster a while ago. Fun is a matter of opinion. "Affordable" was replaced by "money is no object."
With recent sporadic demand for suspension services, I reopened the inquiry to see what we would need to invest to tool up. For just two brands of suspension, Fox and Rockshox, the tool cost got close to $6,000.00.
In the 1990s it was a point of pride, but also a competitive advantage to be able to do things that other shops couldn't, even if you only did it once or twice. Reputation mattered when shops were competing across a fifty or hundred mile radius. Actually, with our summer population, we had to withstand comparison to shops more than a thousand miles away. But the investments were incremental. Even if the demand was inconsistent, it enhanced our legend to have done it. Replace the ratchet springs in your Campy brifter while you wait during your ride around the lake? Can do! Just take a long lunch. More elaborate services took longer, but every time we exceeded expectations it built our reputation. However, the budget to do that depended on a lot of cash flow from the other sectors of the shop. Our reputation-builder jobs seldom paid for themselves directly. Campy ratchet springs are cheap enough, but suspension service takes up a lot of clean space and requires tools and parts on hand.
A new shop starting today will invest in the tools needed for the technology of today. A new shop aimed at the new clientele of incoming young riders and established riders still spending the money to have current technology will make their money back on the jobs those riders demand. Over time, the new shop will mature, accumulating legacy parts and tools as they fade from the leading edge and become "that old stuff." In an old shop, our old stuff reaches well back into the last century. But we acquire our new stuff based on actual demand, not anticipated demand. We don't manage to keep a full representation of tools and parts for whatever might come in, because we only make survival margins on what actually does come in. And what might come in probably won't bring with it enough money to have made our preparations worthwhile.
The arc from new shop to old shop to used to be a shop plays out everywhere in different proportions based on local conditions. A big shop in a busy area will be able to invest in tools and training. They stand a better chance of recruiting young mechanics who will put in their few years before moving on to something that might actually earn them a living. At the same time they will accumulate old parts and tools to service the variety of machines that might come to them as bikes remain in service for decades. The bikes that remain in service for decades are not the ones with all the fancy new crap. The new shop, focused on the latest, will have to make an extra effort to learn about the antique stuff, and master the skills to care for it.
Wolfeboro has a mountain bike subculture now that exists completely separately from our shop. No one has yet invested in a new shop to serve them officially, but one or two amateur operations do it now as hobbyists. It would cost us thousands of dollars to prepare to compete with these hobbyists, with no guarantee that we would prevail. In all likelihood, we would never see a return on our investment. So we limp along as those contemptible old geezers with a noisy bar underneath us and toilets flushing over our heads from the short-term rental condo above us.
In another part of town, a "makerspace" offers bike services through a hobbyist who retired from medical practice, and perhaps a few other volunteers with varying degrees of knowledge and experience. People pop up all the time who "used to work in a shop" before doing something actually respectable for the bulk of their earning years. Some of them possessed a high degree of skill for their time. Absolutely none of them have the slightest interest in picking up a couple of shifts in our shop to cover small gaps in the schedule. The makerspace does free service and offers repair instruction by the good doctor. He seems to be fairly competent, but only with what he has personally used. And he's devoted to tubeless tires, so I consider that a bad influence on inexperienced newcomers.
We never get to find out who didn't come to us because they went somewhere else. Our overhead dictates our pricing, so we face an immediate handicap against hobbyists who require little or no money for their services. That's one of the pitfalls of the "free market." People who will do the work for free have to be pretty bad at it for the average consumer to choose to go to someone who costs anything, let alone charges a rate that tries to keep pace with the cost of living. Even a spiffy new shop equipped with the tools and parts to fix your space-age marvel will face that challenge.
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