Specialized did us a favor

 

A customer ordered this bike online from Specialized. It was one of two. He tried to assemble his own. When he hit a snag, he decided to bring this one -- his wife's -- to us without trying to do anything himself.

Because he said he managed to do everything except size the shifter cable correctly on his own bike, I expected to find the usual online bike in a box, pretty close to complete. Instead I found a project akin to doing a colonoscopy on C3PO.

This bike, a Specialized Como SL 4.0, was designed to look like a picture of a bike drawn by someone who has never looked closely at a bike. The hydraulic brake lines and shift cable are routed into the handlebar within inches of their requisite levers. The brake lines and cable housing are not seen again until they emerge near the brake calipers and rear hub respectively.

Whoever assembles this bike is expected to feed the brake lines and shifter cable from the top of the head tube into the base of the handlebar stem and out through the proper side of the bar to the correct exit. These are not sinuous cords that curl easily into the contortions necessary. The assembly video (there is no printed manual) shows the Park Tool internal cable threading tool, which is a clever and effective device. But even that is not sufficient to ease the whole trip. I don't know if the customer bought himself one or just winged it. We'll find out when he brings his flubbed effort to us.

There is absolutely no margin for error in sizing the brake lines, and nearly none with the shift cable. In the picture you can see that I tried to get away with leaving the front brake line the length that it came. This is because the line already had the barbed fitting in the end of it, and no spare fitting was provided. The TRP brake appears to be a special makeup just for Specialized. You can salvage a barbed fitting from the end of a brake line, but you can't count on being able to. I'm guessing that the remaining Specialized dealers after they downsized a few years ago have the requisite parts on hand. We have an assortment of fittings, but not these specific ones.

The front brake has a problem I still have to diagnose. The lever feel was rock hard, then suddenly went "sploot" (picture a Don Martin cartoon in Mad Magazine). It went totally squishy, but there was no splurge of escaping brake fluid. A few pumps of the lever brought it back to a reasonable travel and resistance, but the pads are now clamped against the rotor. It's even worse than an overfilled SRAM brake, and those are pretty bad. But those are easily cured, and consistently too tight. The "sploot" indicates a mysterious ailment.

At least the fluid is mineral oil, so when it goes all over the place while I'm doing the bleed with so little room to operate it won't eat the paint off this piece of crap.

The assembly video lists the TRP bleed kit as one of the required tools, but never shows the brake lines being trimmed or the system being bled. It just shows the technician/spokesmodel uncapping the lines and connecting them to the levers. Ta daaa! Turbo: It's you only better... or some bullshit like that.

I'm happier than ever that the Big S tossed us in the dumpster after our decades supporting their brand. Their disloyalty to us saves us from having to put a good face on utter crap like this. The owner of this bike would have to work on it themselves or pay a shop to do it. I don't know what sort of loss a Specialized dealer would be expected to eat for the time consuming mess of this needless puzzle, or what an independent shop would charge for the time consuming annoyance. It's apparently supposed to be so easy even a consumer could do it. Maybe not knowing any better is an advantage. If you have no basis for comparison, it just becomes another comedy bit, like assembling flat-pack furniture. You do it once, and when the bike craps out you just replace it.

Big Dealerships take over bike retail

 As part of the bike industry's damage control response to the Covid-19 bike boom, major players like Specialized and Trek have cut loose dozens (at least) of small shops in what they consider minor market areas. At the same time, they have started offering online direct sales, and bought up larger independent retailers to establish concept shops for their own brand where population is more concentrated and disposable income theoretically more common.

In 2021 we managed to wrangle several Specialized ebikes for wealthy customers who ordered them fully prepaid in the fall of 2020. First the orders were delayed by the supply issues that racked every industry, but hit the bike business particularly hard. Then the Big S jacked the price on them even though they were fully paid at the original price, requiring the customer to fork out hundreds more dollars per bike. Then Specialized told us that they didn't think they could deliver the bikes, which would have required us to refund all that money. The full order arrived eventually, a bike at a time over months. We ordered electronic diagnostic equipment to communicate properly with the brains of these technological marvels. Then Specialized terminated our dealership, leaving the people who bought their bikes in good faith with no reliable product support. 

Schwinn used the dealership strategy to build and hold market share for decades. Capitalizing on the dealership concept accepted without question in automobile sales, Schwinn had its shops, where a customer could be assured that all the parts were "Schwinn Approved," and would definitely fit. They had their own size of 26X1 3/8-inch tire, so that a generic 26-inch wouldn't fit the rims on Schwinn bikes. Their shop manuals standardized procedures for their mechanics. The bikes were mostly notoriously heavy, but undeniably durable. The business model weathered competition in the 1970s bike boom, but fell apart in the mountain bike boom that followed, although a lot of that could have to do with mismanagement by the inheritors of the company, who considered the family fortune to be as indestructible as the bikes themselves.

In Concord, NH, Trek has gone into direct competition with one of its own established and popular dealers. Trek bought the Goodale's chain of shops and converted them to Trek concept shops. This included the Concord location. Sorry, S&W. You're just collateral damage.

To the bean counters, a shop network that only follows the money is a good thing. The accountants don't care if riders find themselves in a town or village many miles from an authorized service center and suddenly need a proprietary part, or "dealer-only" service on an electrical component. While I have no sympathy for riders who shackle themselves to proprietary parts and electrical components, I acknowledge that new riders don't think about those issues when they buy their great new bike. Even a lot of riders who have been doing this for years never thought to worry about the trend. The onus is on them for enabling and encouraging the bike industry to do this to us all. Only a few relentlessly annoying voices spoke out against it.

Interesting footnote: I found some ridiculously expensive rigid mountain bike forks on the QBP site the other day when I was looking for rigid 26-inch forks to retrofit customers' bikes that have cheap suspension. This indicates to me that a cult of rigid mountain bikes may be taking hold. While they still embrace the ridiculous drivetrains currently fashionable, the new converts to rigid bikes are seeking refuge from the ongoing costs of maintaining suspension, and the generally poor function and heftiness of cheap and mid-price suspension parts. By making some crazy expensive forks of space-age materials, the industry helps the convert to rigidity show the world that it's a step up, not a step back. See the price tag? For that kind of money, it's got to be good.

The big dealer concept is going to hurt Big Bicycle eventually, if not sooner. In the meantime, my advice is what it always was: buy simple, durable stuff whenever you can. Hold on for its eventual return. There may always be people who will pay too much to have a very limited and expensive experience like technical mountain biking, but I wonder how long that sort of indulgence will survive the kind of economic and social reckoning that is being forced on us by consumer society's willful neglect of the consequences of its appetites since the mid 20th Century.

COVID's killing Specialized

 Specialized Bicycles is dumping small dealers like a centipede shedding injured legs, in a desperate attempt to save itself from the mess that the bike industry started making for itself back in the 1990s, when technofascism combined with outsourcing to create the repeated waves of obsolescence poured on consumers from factories in distant lands.

When the pandemic hit, it wiped out production first, because the factories were all in areas close to the source of the disease. Because of the nature of the disease, and the inertia of human greed, the illness managed to spread rapidly around the world, taking down all of the systems of the global economy. Then the guidelines of social distancing led to an unprecedented surge in outdoor activities, including biking. Shrunken supply met voracious demand.

I don't know how many -- if any -- of the other major companies, like Trek or Giant, are also shriveling under the strain. Specialized was our last major line. Major or minor, we have had no bikes to sell since the spring of 2020 anyway. Almost none, anyway. We received the odd token here or there as supplies dwindled.

Specialized thinks that it is acting in its own best interest, but how are the hundreds of customers who have bought Specialized bikes from us over the years supposed to get the proprietary parts that the industry has made the norm since the epidemic of "innovation" that hit us in the 1990s? Maybe consumers will be able to order directly from Specialized and then go to a derelict dealer like us to have the work done. Maybe the era of the independent bike shop is truly over, and customers with a bit of mechanical inclination will become their own mechanics, under the tutelage of online video experts.

Many more people are trying to do their own work now, bringing them face to face with the obsessive changes forced on them by an industry interested solely in pumping complete bikes out of massive factories, year after year. Maybe consumers will achieve what beleaguered shops had no hope of doing. Maybe they will rebel and vote with their wallets for technological stability and real product support.

It's a long shot. I tried to wise people up when the whole mess was getting started in the 1990s. Instead, they lined up in hordes to lap up the sweet bait that the industry poured out for them. Because riders in a boom don't generally last longer than the brief lifespan of an abused bike, most of them were gone too soon to have to deal with the ephemeral nature of the innovated bicycle.

Most of the innovation has gone into how to make mid-level and entry level bikes reprehensibly flimsy. A year or two ago I was saying that a good $500 bike was a thousand dollars now. Recently I had to revise it to at least two grand, and even then the $500 bike of the 1990s has much more solid basic componentry. It may not have all the moving parts and modern look, but it has a better shot at longevity.

Longevity is out of fashion. Indeed, as we screw up everything from the environment that supports all life to the democracy that supports diverse cooperation, longevity may be an unrealistic goal. Live hard! Die young! Have nothing but fun and go out in a fireball.

In the end, Specialized probably won't die from the pandemic. It will probably shrink to a manageable size, as other companies that have been in its shadow grow to similar size, and serve whatever there is of a riding public in smaller, more regional ways. One can only hope that this leads to some standardization of componentry and simplification of design so that riders are confident venturing beyond the reach of their specific brand's kingdom.

 In the 1970s and early '80s, bikes were simple enough and used enough similar standards to allow small shops to serve riders at all levels at least well enough to keep them riding. The first edition of Sutherland's Handbook was about a quarter the thickness of the tome by the turn of the century. Simplicity allowed for a broader base of support, spread among more manufacturers and independent retailers.

Specialized strong arm

Big Bicycle is always putting the squeeze on independent shops. I don't know how it was in the 1970s boom, but in the 1990s, large brands like Trek, Specialized, and Cannondale put increasing pressure on shops to make large preseason commitments and meet hefty financial thresholds.

Even though technofascism and lack of industry advocacy has fragmented the market, corporate titans are still more interested in their cut from shop income than they are in the realities of daily operations on the frontiers of bike shop territory.

The latest intrusion from Specialized is their insistence that every dealer sign up for automatic bill payment, so that the Big S can suck money directly from the shop account for the full balance due. You get a few days' warning in case you have to ask for some indulgence, but the default is that they get to drain your coffers on their schedule. They feed upstream from every other expense you have, unless some other vendor has sunk a suction line that draws earlier in the month.

The rationale for such things is always the same: If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. Of course you will sell through by the deadline. Doesn't Specialized do everything they can to support their dealers and enhance sales?

Everyone knows that the restaurant business is tough. What are people going to feel like eating? Are they going to want to consume all of those perishable items you had to buy, or have you created a walk-in full of expensive compost? Fortunes can change at the speed of a blackening banana in hot weather. You can see the good times melt like ice cream in a power failure. Spoilage in specialty retail takes longer and does not generate as much obvious odor and muck. But we get stranded just the same. What will the fickle public feel like doing this summer? What unrequested innovation will turn expensive leftover floor stock into a clearance item and require that we buy more tools and watch more instructional videos as we record the loss?

Shops that change their focus in the winter face the added challenge of all the winter vendors playing the same financial games.

I know from previous experience that some shops play games with their vendors. Who knows how many of us have been technically bankrupt for years, dodging from debt to debt to keep from facing the fact that we will never break even? I started wondering way back around 1980 how many people called themselves millionaires because a million people owed them a dollar. The job that lured me to New Hampshire was the brain child of a guy who would purchase equipment, get the delivery guys to do a quickie, half-assed setup, and then use the equipment while withholding payment because he never got a proper setup. To this day I don't know if he was a fully calculating con man or just an idiot. Guys like that make suppliers try to secure their receivables. We all pay the price. But there is also legitimately hard luck. The con man/idiot publisher claimed it was all hard luck. That still left everyone queueing up in bankruptcy court to salvage whatever they could.

It's a hard world. Did you know that if your employer writes you a rubber paycheck, your bank will charge you for taking bad paper? Here is your lifeline, your just reward for services rendered, your ticket to be a productive citizen, but you get screwed if the "job creator" who paid you isn't really good for it. That's a sickening thrill. Then the checks you wrote against it start to bounce, and the fees really pile up.

In a diversified small business, we're always trying to balance the costs and rewards of each facet. While cross-country skiing and bicycling are pretty stupid sectors to remain in, they're not entirely dead. Cross-country is on life support worldwide, but bicycles are the transportation of the future, once the greedheads manage to collapse both the economy and the environment. We may have to learn to make our own stuff in a charcoal-heated forge, but pedal power will endure after motors can no longer be maintained. As humans breed and breed, new bike motors are manufactured every second. But, for the moment, bikes are still a luxury item and a toy. The corporations that market them look for customers with disposable income, and shops that know how to harvest a lot of it.

Red, ready to rock

The red Rockhopper presented no obstacles during its renovation.

I replaced the original substandard rear brake with a salvaged set. Now the pads actually line up with the rim.

I already mentioned what a pleasure these shifters are. A progressive shifter is much more intuitive than one where the lever or levers return to the same position after every shift.

The suspension fork messes up the handling a bit. The original fork crown would have been down about where the brake arch sits on this Rockshox Indy. Riders learned to live with it until manufacturers made frames ready to receive longer forks. The longer forks themselves made mountain bikes feel less nimble even with an adjusted head angle. That became the new normal. With properly set up suspension a bike rides down in the travel more than it sits on top of a specific geometric relationship to the ground.

If this was my bike I would find a rigid fork to match the main frame.

Another period feature is that 135mm stem. It was the age of the long stem. Because I liked dinky little frames, my 15.5-inch Stumpjumper had a 150mm stem. When I shifted to a 16.5-inch Gary Fisher in the mid 1990s it had a longer top tube and shorter stem, reflecting the improved geometry that had evolved. Better it may be, but it took some getting used to.

When we sold this bike our shop supported pretty full representation of at least three bike lines. Not only were there a lot of customers during the boom, there were fewer categories of bike. We could create a lot of variations starting with the basic mountain bike platform. It was a lot easier back then to maintain stock levels and put together bikes modified to individual customer specifications. The categories were mountain, road, hybrid and kids.

There are pluses and minuses to anything. You can get a lot of cool stuff now that you couldn't get then, even to customize a rider's personal setup. The vast array of models within category put a huge strain on a small shop. A small shop has to narrow its options, sometimes painfully, to maintain a niche.

From the golden age of the rigid frame

Just before good quality friction-option top mount shifters disappeared in the beginning of the 1990s we were able to remove the under-bar shifters and saw off the shifter mounts to retrofit the old reliable shifters onto mountain bikes with butted chromoly frames, nice all-around frame geometry and cranks with the newly reinvented round chain rings.

The Rockhopper pictured above would have come with a rigid fork. Rockshox were still an after-market modification adopted first by aggressive riders who were beating on themselves and their equipment in the quest for speed on rough terrain. The $4,000 wonder bikes of today were not even science fiction back then. Riders rode bikes of steel over landscapes of natural stone and dirt and mud. Within a couple of years we would start to hear about the aerial mazes and jungle gyms in places like the Pacific Northwest, but for the moment we rode on what we found nearby, adapting our tires, riding style and expectations to local conditions.

These shifters will not be temperamental no matter how long they've been sitting around. I remember Maynard Hershon whining about primitive shifters in an essay just a couple of years after this bike was new. He was praising the new brifters Shimano had inflicted on the world as a step long overdue to bring bikes out of the 19th Century. I admit I do not long for downtube shifters on my road bike, but I've halted my evolution at barcons.

If this bike had every piece of technological puke the industry had available the refurbishment could cost another $50 or $100 to put on seven-speed compatible parts much cheesier than the original equipment. Seven speed is now below the sludge in the bottom of the barrel in the era of ten- and eleven-speed cassettes.

Check out the forged crank with individually replaceable chainrings. This on a bike that cost about $500. By mid-decade, Specialized was leading the way in cheapening once sought-after models like the Rockhopper to extract extra profit from customers who bought the latest version on the reputation of the earlier ones.

Not everything on this old beauty is pure gold. The original brakes represented an unfortunate mutation on the way to better cantilevers and even better linear pull brakes. When we put the suspension fork on, we replaced the front brake with a decent low-profile cantilever, but the rear set are original. And the brake levers themselves are still the old full-hand type, not the two-finger levers that came to prevail.

The one-inch steerer tube limits options for a new fork, but if someone wanted to return to a rigid fork I bet there are nice castoffs kicking around. The frame was built for a shorter fork than the Rockshox Indy it has now. All the good old chromoly forks can't have been melted down for paper clips already.

It's nice to see something come out of mothballs besides dead moths. New rubber, a couple of cables and a set of brake pads and this thing will be ready for fun.

What's a little extortion among friends?

Specialized recently sent our shop a bunch of bottles as part of their 40th anniversary promotion.  Fortieth, right? So the bottles have reproductions of 20 year old ad slicks. The designs include photos of a rider in US Team garb with Bill Clinton's head pasted in (years before Photoshop), and another rider with Mikhail Gorbachev's head -- complete with birthmark altered to look like a Specialized logo. They were worth no more than a chuckle even then. Now few people even get the reference,  especially from a fuzzy print reduced to fit on a water bottle.

Today I thought of a serious drawback to the Clinton bottle:

Isn't it tempting fate to have a bottle featuring a picture of someone known to have had a notorious bit of trouble containing his fluids?

Maybe if you carry the Gorbachev bottle your bike comes apart. 

The bottles arrived unsolicited and unannounced. Then we got billed for them. We're not allowed to return them. We have to try to unload them at a high enough price to cover the cost we would never have incurred if it had been up to us. 

Extortion. Part of any good long term business relationship. We've been a Specialized dealer since the 1980s. Don't think for a minute that this earns us any respect from the Big S. You're only worth as much as your last order. 

Celebrating your business anniversary by forcing dealers to pay for questionable promotional materials is like telling the people you've invited to your birthday party how much they already spent on the present you bought yourself.