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 as 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.
