No pain, no maintain

Since starting my present commuting route in 1990, I've logged more than 70,000 miles just on that run. This does not include ever decreasing amounts of recreational mileage. I've also added 36 years to my age.

The shop patriarch was 61 when I joined up. He still rode the streets, albeit the quiet ones. Once the local rail trail started evolving, he would ride from his house to the trail. As he continued to age, he then put his bike on a rack and drove to the trail. This was partly motivated by his increasing fear of traffic and partly by the fact that he lived at the bottom of a nasty little wall of a hill. That would be the first thing he faced at the beginning of a ride.

I knew I would get old if I lived long enough. I thought about how moto-centric culture treats cyclists in general, and slower riders in particular when they dare to assert their legal right to travel on the roadways. I've always tried to project an aura of confidence and control out there. I may not be going very fast right now, but you don't want to piss me off. Inside, I settle into fatalistic resignation. Whatever the color of my clothing, my affect is gray. I don't know how well it works, but at least one person has said that it does. Average speed diminishes. Cadence remains.

Average speed diminishes, but this year saw a rebound. I have no explanation for it. I got no more sleep. Still eat too many baked goods and drink too much coffee. But for some reason my average speed improved compared to the previous year or two. Here in the postseason, it has sagged again pretty rapidly as I lose that regular shot of 30 miles a day.

Strength fluctuates in the course of any normal riding season for a rider of any age. You build a base and then manage the peaks and valleys to line up with your competitive objectives. A 30-mile day is nothing to a fit cyclist under 50 years of age. It was easy to rack up 50 miles just in casual darting about, back when I had time for casual darting about.

Athletes live in a world of pain. So do old people. Older athletes and generally physically active people deal with the routine pains of training on top of the unpredictable rate of personal degeneration. On the way up in youth you explore your limits in your time of building strength. On the way down, you patrol the boundaries of diminishing territory, holding what you can for as long as you can. You don't avoid pain at all costs. You assess each pain for what it indicates: risk of injury that can be controlled, or just the new normal that you have to learn to tolerate.

The route and terrain of my commute turn it into a short road race. Short is relative. Far better athletes than I am have ridden much longer commutes. I used to extend this one on a day or two each week, to make the basic route seem shorter. It's a simple element of the training cycle. Vary distance and intensity to build reserves of the different types of fitness you will need: endurance, power, strength, aerobic capacity and anaerobic threshold. That ate a lot of time. That kind of commitment strains relationships with people who might admire your dedication but do not begin to identify with it. 

Racing against motor traffic I don't have to worry about beating vehicles against which I have no chance. By taking a criterium mentality into the streets, a rider can use all of the trained elements of fitness and the situational awareness of riding in a crowded field to enhance safety and effectiveness in traffic. This includes not taking every opportunity to go faster than impeded motorists who could still hurt you with car doors, impulsive turns, or sudden acceleration when the blockage breaks and they see clear running room for even a few car lengths.

Before I get to the little taste of urban crit, I have to ride the moderately hilly highway. It's a good warmup. Terrain and wind define the challenge. The hills are hard. Passing vehicles only bother me in the narrow confines of the first three miles from home. Out on the highway, sight lines are better and motorists are more focused on their own smooth passage to waste time on me. The exceptions are almost exclusively young men who have at various times swerved, honked, yelled, thrown things, passed closely, and attempted to "roll coal" with laughable ineffectiveness. One kid tried to fishtail into me, only his timing and mastery of his vehicle was so bad that his swerve was late and the rebound almost sent him into a glancing collision with an oncoming car. Somebody needed clean underwear after that, but it wasn't me. Generally, riding is much more mentally relaxing than driving, while definitely more physically demanding.

In the shop, I deal with aging riders who evolve more and more upright riding positions. My riding position is less down and forward than when I was in my attempted racing years, but I never had the handlebar stem buried anyway. Sitting with a back angle closer to vertical than 45 degrees feels horribly slow and inefficient to me. Not to say that my road riding position is completely comfortable. It's just that it's the best balance of bearable efficiency when propelling the bike. Any riding position is going to hurt in some way at some point. I want the pain to be worth it. You have to decide what works for you.

Recovery takes longer. Also, any rider over 40 has experienced the increasing lag between effort and consequences. You'll do a hard workout and feel surprisingly good until 18 to 24 hours later, when you feel like you got beaten up and dumped in a ditch. I haven't noticed the lag as much as late sixties turned into seventy, because things tend to hurt right away and then keep hurting. Pushing through that is essential so you don't seize up. This means easy movements, not continued high intensity. Just don't sit and wait for it to get better. Sitting feels good, but getting up is hell. You don't recover that way. You rust.

We had a customer a few years ago, a retired physician age 78, who wanted to replace his beloved old Windsor touring bike from the 1970s. He had logged tens of thousands of miles on it around the desert southwest of the United States when he was based in New Mexico. He ended up buying three Surly bikes: a Cross Check, a Long Haul Trucker, and a Troll, all custom spec'd. He was also an active member of the cross country ski association, and an avid dancer. When he mounted a bike he could have been a teenager, he moved with such practiced grace. I never got to see him dismount after a long ride, though.

I can attest that getting on the bike feels much the same as it always has. It's a bit harder to swing the leg over the saddle, but you can work around that in various ways. Unfolding from it afterward is a different story. I might zip through town competently enough, but if I don't pay attention dismounting at the shop door it could get embarrassing. Switching from riding to walking isn't the fluid landing of a cyclocross ace. Not that it ever was, for me, but I could at least get off the bike without looking like an albatross having a bad day.

For my first two decades or more of dedicated human-powered travel on bike, on foot, and on skis, a forced layoff meant a little loss of fitness, but that was easily regained when activity resumed. Even for the next couple of decades regaining fitness was only a little slower. After that, though, more than a week off the bike led to noticeable deterioration. I'm sure that my use of caffeine as an antidepressant doesn't help with the hollow feeling in my heartbeat. Your results may vary. The first objective of winter is surviving the winter. 

Exercise is an antidepressant as well, but I need very high doses to feel it was worth the effort. Indoor exercise is so boring that I either take forever to get through a trivial workout or slam myself into too-high intensity too fast, to squeeze as much as I can into a tiny window of willingness. More likely these days I get distracted by household chores and internet trivia and then it's time to go to bed too late, get up too early, and drag myself through another work day.

Bike commuting season is a mixed blessing. It provides a reliable workout and considerable savings in fuel costs, but the schedule is inflexible and the distance is fixed. Even if life doesn't change in a cataclysmic instant, it still changes by the day. Days add up. You have to visit your pain threshold regularly in the off season to know where to expect it when it matters.

The labor conundrum

 Management likes to say that my expertise is valuable, but my hourly rate still falls far below our workshop hourly rate. Not complaining, just observing. My valuable expertise is another commodity marked up to bring in revenue to support the business as a whole.

From the mid 1990s through the first decade of the 21st century we could work on the principle "charge what you're worth and be worth what you charge." As the economy has shifted, and in many ways deteriorated, public perception of that worth has diminished while our cost of living has gone the same way as everyone else's. 

Value is relative. Customers don't tend to equate their repair bill directly with my paycheck. They relate it to the perceived value they put on their bike.

I've been doing this long enough to remember when twenty dollars was considered a lot of money. In 1979, five dollars an hour was enough to secure space in a crappy apartment as long as you weren't also trying to own and maintain a crappy car. That also only worked if you had a full-time job at that rate. People think that scraping by on multiple part time gigs is something recent. For low level service workers, it's been around for a long time. And bike shop grunts fall solidly into the low level service worker category.

The bike business had its respected artisans during the steel era, and even edging into the aluminum age. Oh and don't forget titanium. Ah, metal, formed with fire and artistry. Professional cyclists actually raced on these primitive machines. We dodged the mammoths and giant sloths that lumbered across our paths in those days. How did we survive?

Anyway, if you've hung around bike shops for long enough, which is too long for any sane person with a scrap of ambition and a sense of self preservation, you get used to being low-balled and reamed out by your clientele, who think that anything that doesn't have a motor should be cheap to work on. It was cheap to buy! Or if it was expensive, that should be the end of it.

Way back in the 1960s, as a kid, I remember adults talking about a bill they got for some service or other, whether it was on a car or a home appliance, and how "most of it was labor!" This was usually uttered with a tinge of disbelief or resentment, as if it was a frivolous gouge lathered on top of the justifiable part of the bill. "Yeah, they really kill you on the labor."

Whether a price is fair or not depends on many variables. I've wondered for years how to figure out if the entire global economy is based on anything more solid than perceived value. In the time it would take to do a comprehensive audit, the situation would have changed so completely that the data would be useless. In the meantime, I narrowed the question to trying to figure out who was enslaved on my behalf. How is even my meager lifestyle subsidized by the wretched conditions of laborers near or far? 

When someone brings in a bike to be repaired, I think a lot more about how I'm going to accomplish it than an immediate judgment of the cost. I was startled today to be reminded just how recently you could buy a really decent upper mid grade mountain bike for $800 or less. It was a couple of decades ago, but that seems recent to an old fart. The rocketing inflation in bike prices didn't really kick in until closer to 2010. By that time the local bike market had shifted from dozens of mountain bikes sold per year to maybe half that many road bikes in the same span, with a few cheap hardtails sold to kids and workers who for various reasons didn't drive. By the time technical mountain biking really reasserted itself, the numbers were still low and the prices climbed steadily, while the bikes themselves mutated fully from something still resembling a bike to the overtly motorcycle-based configurations now prevalent. 

For technical mountain biking, the change was necessary. The original concept of the mountain bike as just a durable clunker was dead and buried. It had given birth to the hyper-technical beast of today, but couldn't occupy the same ecological zone.

When people bring in bikes from the Late Middle period of mountain bike evolution, they have the last of the easily repairable specimens. However, even in its best shape, such a bike is ill suited to the technical trails and riding style practiced today. Modern mountain bikes and modern trails have evolved together. So if a customer wants to spiff up an older bike for actual trail riding, they need to understand that it will be historical reenactment, like bombing down Tuckerman Ravine on 200cm telemark skis, with leather or early plastic boots, and basic cable bindings. If on the other hand the customer wants a durable exploring bike that's more technically capable than a road-configured gravel bike, they've got a winner with any properly fitted old mountain bike from the late 1980s to about 2008 or '09.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the cost of living and the cost of parts have both blown up so that the labor cost to have a commercial shop mechanic work on that bike will hit you with a bill that makes you question the value of it at all. Don't fall for the "I could just get a new one" fallacy, because enshittification has been progressing at least as rapidly as basic inflation. A bike for $700 in 2006 has components far better than the inflation-adjusted $1,300 bike of today. Astonishing? Yes. Depressing as hell, too. There is no direct equivalent in modern bikes.

Management is always on me to charge top dollar for the labor. Our price list used to be based on a la carte prices for individual services and some degree of discount when package deals like a tune-up or overhaul meant that some labor processes overlap. However, as times have gotten progressively tougher, management wants to see full whack getting charged for any parts installation added to the basic tune-up cost. The bills grow startlingly, leading customers to pay grudgingly, post nasty internet reviews, abandon the bike without paying, or, if they got the estimate beforehand, just deciding to scrap the project. Everyone loses in that case, because a bike that could have remained in service goes to the dump, and we get no income. Customers who say that they will pay us for the time we put into the estimate routinely don't come through on that and we never see them again. The ones who paid grudgingly also generally disappear forever, too.

The day is rapidly coming when storefront shops will not be able to offer comprehensive service because no one will pay enough to cover the overhead. The future of bike service lies in independent service-only facilities. Go buy your bike somewhere else.

 My mentor Diane and her late husband ran a full machine shop out of their house in Orlando from the late 1970s. After his death in 1995, she continued. She's scaled back now in her late 60s, but probably still provides a wealth of knowledge and willing skill. Around this area I hear about places where people can get their older bikes worked on for free or close to it. Sometimes, the mechanics actually know what they're doing. As long as the wheels and handlebars stay tight, most riders don't care, and you can't beat the price. Free! I didn't secure a lavish enough retirement income to work for free.

A bike shop used to be a beacon for riders in distress; the place to find knowledgeable service and support. The cost of operating that lighthouse keeps rising. Retail commerce moves more and more online. The pay scale doesn't favor long-term staff retention. A shop that can attract a steady flow of new mechanics has more to teach them in less time before they age out and get serious about earning an actual living. The limiting factor is what the public is willing to pay. There's only so much money in the industry as a whole. Everyone in the business has to share from that limited pot.

E-bikes have siphoned off most of the recreational bike market. Riders who rely entirely on their own muscle are becoming rare. The e-bike industry has only some overlap with traditional bike companies, and that appears to be shrinking, as online sales of weird brands dominate both the pedal-assist and e-moto categories. E-bikes are more expensive than traditional pedal bikes to build and support. As consumer interest shifts away from the most bike-like configurations, old school bike manufacturers reduce offerings when they don't expect to sell through the inventory. Don't bother making what people aren't buying.

This was starting to show up at the end of the mountain bike boom. While excessive technology was a factor in killing the market, consumer ennui was also kicking in. Booms always end. Much of the time they leave behind a higher total number of participants compared to before the boom, but never as many as at the height. Biking without power assist may actually have shrunk by now.

Hard to say how it ends. Bikes are a widely distributed species of varmint, with enough variants to dodge complete extinction. Bike shops, on the other hand, might well be exterminated or nearly so. 

My friend was a real piece of sh*t

 The road makes strange comrades. I've written before about micro landmarks. Micro landmarks are those little things that a cyclist will notice because we scrutinize the road closely for hazards, and we're generally traveling much slower than a motorist piloting a two-ton sensory deprivation tank. You can develop an odd affection for some of this detritus.

Sometime around early June, I was riding home on Elm Street when I noticed a small pile of what I guessed was raccoon feces sitting in the lane. I based my identification on the caliber and content, and the tendency of many animals to leave poop piles to mark their territory and their routes through it.

This poop led a charmed life. It had been deposited in exactly the right position for cyclists to pass to the right of it and motorists to straddle it. Also, we had very little rain this summer, and almost none of it was heavy. Even when we did get a downpour, the poop must have set up enough to resist the deluge.

All of June passed. I started to feel some admiration for the little shit. As July followed, the poop's survival took on a supernatural quality. It diminished a little in size, and showed signs of some glancing tire tracks, but remained a three-dimensional presence as summer matured into August.

Onward the season fled, and the poop remained. My bike commuting days were winding down as the sunset encroached, and still the little turd stood its ground. As one little shit to another, I saluted its persistence.

October marks the end of daily practical bike commuting. Short hours on Sunday have allowed me to get that one day a week on the bike, but when the clocks change on November first that will end. Last Sunday I noticed that the poop had finally been reduced to a flat stain. Whether from natural forces, a direct hit from a motor vehicle, or some combination, its time was finally ending. From the car, I can't even discern where it was. This Sunday I will get one final slow flyover to see what's left.

Farewell, you little shit. You were one strange inspiration.

The crackle of death

 Seasons change. You dig out an item you haven't needed in months, like a favorite pair of tights, or wind briefs. You tug gently on the elastic waistband and hear the dreaded crackle of death. This morning it was Craft wind briefs I urgently wanted for the morning commute at 27 degrees F. Come spring it will be the better pairs of bike shorts that have sat idle in the drawer awaiting the return of longer days. Will they still be the better pairs?

I do not remember elastic dying so rapidly in my youth, but maybe that's because I outgrew or wore out garments too quickly. Still, it seems to happen a lot sooner these days.

When a garment has a drawcord as well as elastic I simply replace the drawcord with shock cord and a cord lock. If the waistband doesn't have a clear path for a drawcord, sometimes I can use a seam ripper to open the blockage. If the elastic is completely sewn down or perhaps is the entire waistband, it's probably game over, no matter whether the rest of the fabric is still in fine shape.

Somewhat blown out bike shorts will still serve under tights or Sport Hill 3SP pants, because the outer garment will hold them up. Worn by themselves they would be a quick trip to indecent exposure charges.

I have salvaged waistbands from garments that wore out before the elastic dried out, and grafted these onto pieces that have suffered the crackle of death. Sometimes they last so long that the grafted elastic also dies of the crackle. My sewing machine died, so I can't mend anything requiring long stretches of tight, even stitching until I replace it. It was probably more than 50 years old. Hand seaming is possible, but very time consuming.

Stretch fabric itself dies of the crackle. Earlier this century, the old college fencing team was getting together for a reunion. I dug out my old uniform, which had been state of the art in 1976. A mere thirty years later it hung in droopy folds. That's what I get for getting the trendy knit one. If I'd gotten canvas it would still have been fine. Canvas didn't have the sleek fit that all the hot dogs were sporting.

Wool bike shorts and jerseys would get a little baggy, but generally did not depend heavily on the structural integrity of purely elastic fibers. Okay, they would get a lot baggy eventually. But the shorts would generally succumb to saddle friction in riding season and moths in storage, conveniently perishing as a complete unit. Properly blocking and drying any wool garments flat would help them shrink back to size. Wool shorts with natural chamois were also entirely biodegradable. They weren't vegan, however. Wool is just a short haircut for a sheep, but chamois requires a sacrifice.

Many a beautiful day shall pass...

 Many a beautiful day shall pass, witnessed from behind the glass of workplace windows. This is especially true in fall and spring.

In the autumn, riders have to deal with whatever the weather throws at them, plus the shortening days, plus the increasing glare of low-angled sun. Coming off of the bountiful daylight of summer, we have to get used to the encroaching night on both ends of the day.

Drivers seem more frantic, too. I attribute this to the slow arrival of morning light. In summer, the light arrives before most of us need it, signaling our bodies and minds to wake up and get busy. In the growing light coming out of winter, we're naturally energized and sense the lengthening days moving sunset comfortably away from us. The opposite end of that process runs smack into the imposed schedule of rigid hours. We unconsciously speed up to catch up with where we need to be. Morning light drags in after we've already had to wake ourselves, while the sun slouches past us to fall below the horizon. Come late, leave early, and don't help much while you're here. Thanks a lot. The only drivers who aren't rushing around are the foliage tourists.

Right now, the foliage is just passing peak in my area. The interplay of light and color on hillsides, mountains, and water is a visual feast. The middle of many days still offers mild air and the least glary sun. It looks lovely through the shop windows. People come in and remark on how nice it is.

Yeah, well the morning ride might have been just above freezing, with areas of fog. By the time I get to ride home, the sun will be almost gone, the warmth will be fading rapidly, and any clouds will bring the dusk that much sooner. In fact, for my route, the full commute is no longer safe. Shorter options all involve more handling time, saving me no time at all if I do a park 'n' ride, and exposing my car to whatever might happen to it unattended. I can ride the full route on Sundays because the shop closes an hour earlier. Then, on November 1, sunset moves an hour earlier, so my ride opportunity on work days shifts to dawn patrols.

At dawn, the roads may be icy. The closer we get to winter, the more likely this is. The lower the sun gets, the more areas remain shaded throughout the day, preserving ice along the margins of roads that are otherwise clear for motorists. Sure, the law gives me the right to claim the clear part of the lane, but anyone who has really tried that knows that you can end up dead right. Studded tires help with the ice but make cornering on dry pavement less fun.

If you're on your bike you're not doing anything else. You might indulge in various mental games or exercises, but you're not doing the laundry, cleaning the chimney and wood stove, cooking, vacuuming, dusting, tidying up the yard, writing, drawing, whatever else you want or need to do. When daylight sprawls across fifteen hours or more, twelve of those hours are still twelve hours, but they seem to hold more. Darkness feels like night even if the same time of day was mid to late afternoon just six weeks ago.

Fall and winter have their own beauty. Starlight seems sharper in a clear, frigid sky. The northern lights seem more appropriate with arctic air in place. Before we get there, though, we have to get through the darkest, spookiest time, while the leaves are still hanging on and night's emissaries linger through the day in the long shadows.

 I do have lighted bikes with which to explore the roads and trails less traveled after dark. That's all fine and dandy until you have a flat tire or other mishap, miles from home on a woods road in the dark. Also, illumination makes you visible. Visibility makes you vulnerable. I don't make a big thing about being camouflaged, but I do prefer to go relatively unseen through the forest. A companion might seem to make the darkness less spooky until you think about how scary movies are all the scarier as a group gets picked off one by one. It's just a movie, right? Ha ha ha ha...hehhhhh... What's moving through the woods over there?

When the light drains away, it doesn't just seep. The sun doesn't just set sooner, it sets faster. Functional early twilight gives way to deeper, headlight-swallowing murk in a few minutes. You know what I mean: too dark to see, but somehow the powerful lights on your vehicle can't penetrate it yet. Drivers go to full glare before the sun has even disappeared. As dusk deepens, they blind each other. A rider in summer twilight can cruise in the light monochrome for half an hour. Now the silver lasts a few minutes.

On a bike commuting day, I might miss the most beautiful conditions, but when a rider comes into the shop and asks if I'm going to get out there I know that I did and I will. On a roasting hot summer day, the commuting hours are the better ones anyway. With the coming of driving season all I have is an empty space where my bike would be hanging. Not only do I lose the built-in daily ride, I lose a great teaching aid when someone asks what I think of the latest technology. "Check out this 26-year-old frame with parts that go back even further." They don't all go back that far, but they're all part of the simple, versatile approach to a machine that is seldom perfect, but reliably perfect enough. I'll be out on it when I can.

Electronic shifting possibility

 With the widespread adoption of electronic shifting, the industry could offer riders something that disappeared when index-only mechanical shifting took over in the 1990s.

Prior to the coming of pod shifters for flat-bar and upright-handlebar bikes, and brifters for road, the indexed shifters in all categories were built around the shape and placement of friction shifters, and all -- or nearly all -- had the option to revert to friction if the indexing went out of adjustment on a ride when you couldn't stop to dial it back in. Just select the friction option and go back to the old way of feeling and listening to get the gear you want.

The mania for internally routing everything on all high performance bikes has made mechanical cable routing a nightmare. Electronic shifting is the only way that makes sense for a modern spaceship. Maybe that's less true on a mountain or gravel bike with a single chainring and less need for absolute precision shifting, but those categories could still benefit from electronic "friction" shifting.

Think about it: electronic shifting sends a signal to little motors that move the derailleur a set amount to achieve the indexed shifting that mechanical systems relied on perfect cable tension and perfect cable movement to provide. As cogs got closer together and cable routing followed more and more tortuous paths through the interior of the frame, formerly trivial amounts of drag could throw everything off. And cables will still fray and break inside the shifters themselves. Electronic shifting, especially fully wireless, moved all that to the ether. Calling rear derailleur, come in please. Do you read me?

It should be easy for an electronic system to incorporate a "friction" option that would allow for wheel substitutions, for instance, that wouldn't have to be exact. You could stuff an 11-speed wheel into a 12-speed system as long as your friggin' through-axle matches. Maybe the other parameters of the ultramodern spaceship make the kind of improvisations I'm imagining impossible. I just remember dealing with minor compatibility issues getting a wheel from neutral support during a race, and imagining something similar translated into the modern menu of compatibility hypersensitivity. I guess if it would never matter to a sponsored professional it should never matter to an amateur technolemming. What is the industry's financial and competitive motive to bother with such a thing?

I haven't checked lately, because I don't own any of the crap, and no customer has needed me to mess with theirs recently, but the "friction" option may exist in the fine-tuners already built into the shifters as they are. Last time I had to mess with one from SRAM and Shimano respectively, it didn't seem like something you would want to do on the fly, especially every shift.

A true friction simulator would let the rider control the derailleur directly through its entire travel. Push the uppy control to go up and the downy control to go down. Stop where you want. Instead of fixed increments per push, just go until told to stop. Maybe it already exists. As I said, I have no personal interest, and have not had to develop a professional one as yet. And would a technolemming even put up with it? So much skill has been eliminated from the operation of the machine that several generations of riders have never experienced it.

A rider interested in durability, versatility, and longevity probably already gravitates away from the most spacy spaceships. Unfortunately, the industry kills its elderly and dishonors its ancestors as a matter of course, so top quality mechanical stuff is disappearing rapidly. At one time, Dura Ace STI was 8-speed mechanical. Now it's all electronic except for the last remaining barcons. And the barcons are index-only. If you have nightmare cable routing they offer no refuge. Index-only makes them picky eaters anyway. Thanks for nothing.

Electronic shifting brings with it the hassle of battery charging and eventual disposal. Old mechanical shifting cables have to be disposed of as well, but they can go in with the scrap metal to be made into something else. But if you're stuck on the modern way, electronic friction shifting might be a way to blend in some of the long-lost convenience of more primitive times.

"Customer service," LOL

 One of our hardworking customers who has been a bike commuter for years recently had the fork on his Fuji Conductor 2.1 snap while he was riding, leading to the crash you can well imagine. Thanks to his good karma or something, he did not get all stove up, but the bike did.

The steerer tube of the fork broke up inside the frame. This is a sign of poor material, not abuse or neglect by the rider. It just up and quit on him.

Here's the problem: Fuji was distributed in the USA by Bike Co. Fuji's parent company, Pacific Glory Worldwide, (PGW) decided to take over distribution themselves, cutting Bike Co out. Our customer bought his bike from us when Bike Co was responsible for support. But it's a Fuji bike, so PGW shares responsibility, particularly as they were the corporate titan above Bike Co. Neither corporation has a fork or a bike in stock to replace our customer's defective vehicle. "Sorry, we checked the warehouse. Nothing there."

There's been some chatter about kicking in for a generic fork if we can find one, but the industry as a whole has abandoned the 15mm thru axle and 100mm spacing on his fork, meaning that we would have to track down either a fork with the exact dimensions to match his now abandoned piece of industrial debris or a fork that will at least play nicely with the head tube on his bike, along with adapters to fit his front wheel to the axle dimensions of the current crop of forks.

This. is. bullshit. Because of the way that retail has migrated online, our trusty parts suppliers have less and less of the variety they used to offer. The vomitous explosion of different standards has led to a wilderness of new old stock, used, shady, or weird options that might or might not work depending on how accurate the published specs are. Order it and find out! Maybe you have to send it back and try again. Maybe it actually works.

The burden falls onto us, an independent retailer dealing with all of the work we have to do already, to do the treasure hunt for a replacement part to cover a manufacturer's defect. Yet the manufacturers quit treating shops like partners and started treating us like the first rank of suckers way back in the 1990s. The mountain bike boom made the bike business a lot less good natured and collegial.

US bike industry revenue surged approximately $4.1 billion between 1980 and 1999. It has only increased about $3.6 billion in the twenty-seven years since then, based more on spiraling prices than on increased unit sales. Number of bikes sold annually started dropping around the turn of the century and have remained flat ever since. Yet the industry continues to place its faith in higher prices, lower quality, and ephemeral features that may play well in the pro racing ranks, but nowhere else. I don't mean the lower quality part. Pro machines carry a hefty price tag. But they are not built to last. They're built to perform. Any wannabes who buy pro-looking stuff are just setting themselves up to pour money into their hobby. Is your hobby riding, or just spending money on your bike?

I owned a pro-level bike in 1980-'85, but that was when pro level was coming out of old world craftsmanship and componentry that hadn't changed a great deal in two or three decades. A pro of today stuck on a bike like that would consider it punishment. The global arms race has pushed the acceptable baseline far beyond a sweet old Masi or Cinelli that a racer could beat the crap out of, but a hobbyist could cherish for a lifetime. You won't have a modern high performance bike for more than the lifetime of a small rodent. The entire bike has become another consumable. You are expected to chew it up and shit it out on a regular schedule. If your budget doesn't extend to that, so long and thanks for playing.

If you are a practical cyclist, the math gets even tougher. I push around a fleet of bikes, none of them newer than twenty years old. I built a new "bike that never was" a couple of years ago to park at the cellist's work apartment, but the basis of it was a 1970-ish Raleigh Super Course. They are all moderately sporty, but I would ride any one of them to work, and most of them to the store. All but the road bike have racks and fenders. Two (so far) have generator light systems.

As the worker bees shift to electric bikes, their plight grows clearer. Where one might have bought a series of beater cars, now they buy a series of e-bikes as each in turn develops some crippling problem. For a worker who can't get a driver's license, this is their world: a revolving door of e-bikes ridden to death.

If we want to help out our customer from existing stock, our only remaining option is a nice mid-drive Marin with an original retail price nearly three times what his Fuji cost him. We could whittle it down some, but only down to a little more than twice what the Fuji cost. And why should we take the hit for Fuji's failed product?

I put the question to PGW and had not heard back at time of writing. My guess is that they offer us a shop a credit toward future purchases from them. We can only cash in by remaining a dealer and ordering more bikes to sell. It sort of puts cash in the customer's pocket, but again burdens us for representing the Fuji brand, come what may. This kind of thing is the norm now in product support. It goes beyond the bike business as I'm sure you have encountered. The freight train of obsolescence seems to have no brakes. That doesn't mean it has achieved perpetual motion. It means it's going to fly off a curve and plummet to the valley far below at some point.