Saved from six

 Management rearranged the remaining bones of our skeleton crew to get me back to five days instead of six. So that's truly great. Now we're back to just dealing with the fickle weather, mushy economy, and receding consumer interest. Business as usual.

Yesterday I spent the morning poring over the Fuji B2B site, because the current US distributor is dumping product after Pacific Glory Worldwide terminated their contract to distribute the brand in the USA. Some categories are already wiped out: all e-bikes, for instance. Bikes sales took off very slowly last season, and Fuji models didn't generate a lot of excitement. Then again, nothing did. Aside from e-bikes, most inquiries were looking for gravel bikes.

Although most growth in the bike business is in e-bikes, specialist shop Seacoast E-Bikes is having a buy one, get one free sale. Times are tough all over.

This winter is marked by economic and political uncertainty in addition to storm timing and consumer interest. Individual retailers might not have that in the front of their minds. Retailers and consumers alike are tempted to brush it off as overly dramatic. But with tariff policy and oafish threats against longstanding allies throwing turbulence into global trade, and so much of our consumer hunger fed with foreign-made goods, we are seeing effects regardless of whether we are willing to acknowledge the underlying cause.

A bike shop has to project future demand in order to take advantage of the incentives suppliers offer, for discounts on product and shipping. The Fuji dump is offering free freight on the bikes if the bill is paid within 90 days. There's no way we will sell a significant proportion of the bikes we order within 90 days, but the discount off wholesale still offsets the freight charge we will face. What we don't know is whether anyone will be in the mood to buy anything by the time the weather warms up enough to get most people thinking about bikes at all.

It's always been a bit of a crapshoot. The stakes just keep getting higher and higher. If no one wants what you're selling, you can't even liquidate. It's all just junk.

Do we really need billionaires?

 As someone who works in a town where trickle down economics drives most of its economy, I see its benefits and the clear boundary beyond which it never flows.

The luminaries of Wolfeboro and Tuftonboro don't give a crap what happens to Ossipee, Effingham, Brookfield, New Durham... Communities with frontage on Lake Winnipesaukee attract wealthy homebuyers. Some of the families have invested in businesses that exploit the other lakes in surrounding areas. Those water bodies don't attract the A-list. They're just good for cash flow. The real life takes place overlooking The Big Lake.

Subtract the billionaires and millionaires, and what do the lakefront towns have to offer in a reality-based economy? The English monarchy no longer needs masts for its sailing ships. Water-powered mills went out more than a century ago. The stony soil is hard to farm. The roads have to wind over and around steep little mountains, and skirt the shores of numerous lakes. Transporting manufactured goods takes longer than in places with straighter highways and easier grades.

Building up a modern economy would mean destroying the quaintness and natural beauty that attract tourists and seasonal residents. Residential development is already doing that, along with the retail sprawl that follows. The state might build up its intellectual economy, but tech jobs seem to be targets of AI. There won't be much left but retail clerk and food service jobs, and those depend on having a decent amount of people around who can afford to buy things and eat out. Oh, and retail is increasingly conducted online now.

Visitors buy things on impulse and necessity, and locals try to support local businesses, but the local businesses themselves have trouble sourcing their products because online retailers feed upstream from their suppliers, driving costs up and margins down, as well as sometimes cleaning out the supply chain completely. Online retailers have a fraction of the overhead that brick and mortar stores do. Massive giants like WalMart can buy with the budget of a small country, effortlessly outbidding a small country store.

There were seasonal residents before there were billionaires. Indeed, fairly average, upper middle class people used to be able to afford camps and cottages to come and rough it for a few weeks every summer. People generally got along fine without soaring, glass-fronted palaces listing for millions of dollars. The boom in the 1980s that ushered in that era drove most of the modest cottage owners out of the area because they couldn't afford the tax hikes that came along with the spike in real estate valuation. It's only gotten worse from there.

It doesn't help that New Hampshire derives most of its tax revenue from property taxes. It was a good scam when seasonal residents shut down their places in early fall and only needed someone to snowshoe in occasionally to check on them through the off season. The more people who live here year-round the more services they need, including some sort of schooling for the young 'uns. Also, the more elaborate the homes, the more care and feeding they might need when the lords of the manor are absent. It drives municipal costs higher for fire departments among other things.

The real estate boom of the 1980s led to a population boom as new residents flocked in to build and maintain the new homes and condos. While much of the new construction went to seasonal residences, the surge required year-round personnel to make sure that everything was ready when the owners arrived. That meant more families with kids in the schools. That meant higher taxes. A collapsing economy would mean more people moving away if they could.

Already, fewer people visit than we saw in the 1990s. Traffic still gets snarled, because the road system was never designed for this kind of population. New England frugality combined with difficult terrain to produce only as many roads as they absolutely needed. Main Street is a numbered state highway. It's actually two state highways that meet at Pickering Corner and turn north for a few miles as Center Street before separating to their separate terminations. Route 28 comes all the way up from southern New Hampshire. A traveler on it could have been driving for a couple of hours already before getting wedged into South Main Street in little ol' Wolfeboro. Route 109 runs from Maine coast sort of east-west to Sandwich, NH. They will always funnel travelers through the center of town. Maybe some of them give up and park long enough to spend money. Or they just crawl along in their air conditioned capsules, maybe taking in the sights, maybe hating every minute. Who knows?

The town has become a center for retirees who can afford it. I would say rich retirees, but where is the threshold of richness? When everyone rode simple, affordable mountain bikes, I had a better sense of the number and ages of children in the area. They might not all buy their bikes from our shop, but we did have the best service department for miles. I don't know what they do now, because we almost never see them. I saw a dip in the school population in Effingham for a couple of years, but that seems to have rebounded. People move to the more obscure communities of Carroll County for their own reasons, like establishing a sovereign citizen compound or taking a shot at homesteading. As homeschooling has grown, institutional enrollment may not reflect the number of families and their offspring. People are around. I don't know all the ways in which they finance it.

Traditional industries include logging and sand and gravel mining. The area has trees and lots of glacial till. One pit complex has its own rail line directly to Boston. Those piles of sand and gravel you see when you pull into North Station on the Downeaster came from Ossipee. Neat, huh? However, shipping the actual substance of your state to another state is ultimately not sustainable.

One rich person is actually a colony of symbiotic organisms feeding off of the wealth assigned to that individual. This is supposed to be the justification for trickle-down economics as the primary model for the distribution of money, but it only goes as far as the personal interests of the named owner. It might work if rich people were perfectly evenly distributed across the country, but they aren't and they can't be. The rich person's discretionary spending goes to the things they like. Our shop happens to have a few wealthy people, both seasonal and local, who like various aspects of what we offer. As time goes by, succeeding generations feel less affection and obligation, meaning that our time as a favored business will fade. It's already happening. The theme park buyers have much more enthusiasm for the little bakery and the boatyard.

To some extent, that's just life. A business has to evolve with the generations as they come along. We're already so old and creaky that the younger generation of riders writes us off without a second thought. We have no representative among them as we did in the 1990s. Someone might buy the name and the tools, and make the business relevant again, but it won't be the same business. Cross-country skiing is even more endangered than road riding in the age of climate and economic collapse. People need money and motivation to want to do laps on a short course of snowmaking in the increasingly common winters when nature does not provide. I have my gear, but I couldn't afford to update it. I wouldn't trudge around that loop on my back-country gear. Well, maybe I would just for exercise during the work week, but if I'm going to trudge I will more likely just go for a hike on my day off.

The world is changing. The economy is changing. Ordinary people have less money, young people have different ideas how to spend what they have, and there aren't enough handy billionaires to take up the slack. We will never be where we were in the 1990s, feeling confident and well funded and full of unfounded hope. The middle class I grew up in was a sustained illusion. The devices that projected that illusion fell apart as the century ended. Don't look back and fall for the bullshit about how a whole family could be supported on one income in the 1950s and '60s, because that was already based on unsustainable factors. Look at the current data and figure out how to do the best we can for the people alive now, and inevitably joining us.

We will die competing for big shares of it. We will die trying to squeeze profit out of every product and service. I don't mean in the sense that "everybody dies." I mean soon, and nastily. Some people are fine with that. Assholes like that have driven our thinking for far too long. They're the ones promoting fossil fuels, reviving colonialist thinking, and making excuses for wars of territorial expansion. They're the ones who have been stockpiling guns in the United States since the 1980s, and lulling themselves to sleep with fantasies of the glorious civil war they're going to have. Because this country has a surfeit of both assholes and guns, they are a political force to be reckoned with, but that doesn't mean by fighting them on their own terms. It won't go well for them, but it will be bloody and waste a lot of decent people's lives. That's how these wars always go.

Unlimited wealth, unlimited liberty, and unlimited personal armament are not ingredients for a pleasant future. While a majority of people might partake responsibly, we are seeing in our lives right now how a minority can use the leverage of money, the threat of force, and a lack of empathy to put survival at risk and make life difficult for everyone.

E-bikes will kill the bike industry as we know it

 We're witnessing the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the bike industry and in popular bike usage. Where people used to talk about the dangers of riding on the streets, now they talk about the dangers of sharing the sidewalk with numbnuts on e-bikes. But that's not what will kill the bike industry. The sheer ease of riding a smokeless moped, combined with the popular misconception that you can neglect them they way you used to neglect your meat-powered bike, have driven sales at a phenomenal rate.

In our shop just this year, a few callers asking about bikes we carry have asked about gravel bikes, and dozens have asked about e-bikes. Then we've had a smattering of calls for kids' bikes. Maybe one or two for technical mountain bikes. Repair business is steady, but it's only enough to overload our understaffing. If we had one more mechanic we would worry about paying them. General retail, mostly clothing, used to cover a lot, but those sales are flat, too.

Yesterday I was working on the firewood piled in my driveway when I heard the buzzing of tires on the road out front. Two riders on fat-tire e-bikes blazed past at full throttle, pulling close to 30 miles per hour. Bareheaded, in shorts and tee shirts, they flashed past, headed north. The only sound was their buzzing tires and Dopplered conversation. Nothing could go wrong. They were only riding bikes after all.

In more congested traffic situations, grim accidents are piling up, but only grumpy outside observers blame the bikes themselves. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. E-bikes don't cause crashes. Unprepared riders on e-bikes cause crashes.

Yes, the mass and speed of the bikes make the crashes worse, but they only combine with the lack of street smarts among the riders.  Bad riding habits lead to more dangerous situations. The motor assistance just makes it easier to get there. People will ride the e-bike who would never consider riding the rapids of a busy street on a bike powered entirely by themselves.

I see riders on e-bikes on the street below the backshop windows. Most of them have bikes with a throttle option, which appears to be their default. Looking across the bay toward the train station where the rail trail terminates, I can see many other moped riders. They jet up effortlessly to a cruising speed a purely pedaling rider would train hard to achieve and maintain.

I pull out of my driveway and warm up at maybe 10-12 miles per hour. The smokeless moped rider hops on and spurts away at 20. Who would put up with the snail's pace of a bike without a motor? What do they gain in the short run by giving up the power assist? There is no long run. People flit from place to place and thought to thought. If the bike is cheap transportation, and a few dollars more gets a faster machine requiring less effort, who will bother to work harder?

Demand for bicycles was already falling fast as the 21st Century began. The decline accelerated, with only a brief plateau when 2020 brought a surge of demand coinciding with a dearth of supply. The bike industry was struggling after its profitable bender through the 1990s. E-bikes will end up being a bigger category than mountain bikes were at their height, but the profits won't go to traditional bike companies unless they seriously retool into motor vehicle companies. How much money will be left over for the far less popular non-motorized bikes?

Legend has it that bike manufacturers in the 1880s and '90s were surprised by the high level of demand from working class people to buy what were considered luxury items. The manufacturers hadn't recognized yet that they had created a revolutionary transportation device that needed very little maintenance for the amount of mobility it provided to people formerly limited only to shoe leather. The same calculation drives the market in e-bikes now.

Change happens faster and faster in the technological world, but pedal-powered bikes won't disappear overnight. Especially if laws and regulations restrict the age of riders on motorized bikes, pedal power will remain the child's first experience on a two-wheeler. However, I have already had to deal with motorized balance bikes for a couple of richie rich little kids whose parents want them to have the latest greatest thing. On private property, anything goes. Buy your 12-year-old a Lamborghini and let them blaze around your private race track. Meanwhile, out in the slums, kids may have to settle for the time-honored ritual of learning to wobble along under their own power until they're old enough to get a real grownup vehicle that doesn't require them to sweat.

My parents, and other adults born between the world wars, recount their experiences riding bikes. Very few people carried the habit into adulthood in the United States. In the 1950s and '60s, the bike was just a step on the way to becoming a driver. You could even buy an accessory for your bike that looked like a motor and made varoom noises. No one knows what the future holds for our species. Maybe we cover the planet with our sprawling cities, through which we dart on our motorized little bikes. The only wide-open spaces will be the ones utterly inhospitable to life. Nature will consist of cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and viruses. So will our diet.

Who is this dirtbag?

 We see them all the time, even in our affluent resort town. A sketchy character brings in a bike that no collecting hobbyist or trendy technolemming would ever want, and bargains for the least amount of work we can do to get the machine operational again. It doesn't even have to be safe. Just get it so that the pedals pull the chain around and the bike moves forward. Some of them don't even have brakes. A scuffed work boot or blown out sneaker will suffice.

Then there are the eccentrics with limited finances and one oar in the water. They come in all ages, genders, races. Some are born with challenges that hinder their pursuit of income and housing. Others suffer head injuries, or battle addictions. Some are just on their own track, seeing the world in their own way. Somehow, they have all come to the bicycle, and the bicycle has welcomed them.

Life already wasn't fair when I was a kid, and it has only gotten less fair since then. There are more and more people, many in unstable family settings, or no family setting at all. It's comforting to embrace the lie that they would all be fine if their families were miraculously transformed into the mythical models of the 1950s and '60s, but the cracks were just plastered over back then. The simple fact that we keep cramming more and more people onto the planet while wondering why ecosystems are failing and the climate itself has been buggered never seems to influence the idea that social failure is solely the result of flawed character in at least two generations of strivers.

We deal with riders in each of those categories just in our dinky town. In my previous bike shop job, in 1980-'81 in Alexandria, Virginia, customers ranged from a family who could afford custom built little Eisentrauts for the kids, down to Moped David, who loved his yellow Motobecane "Yellow Bird." Location matters, so we had more from the affluent end of the scale back then, but in Annapolis I saw the bike hierarchy laid out as well. I only worked in a backpacking and mountaineering store there, but we had one customer who had lost his marriage and home and pickup truck to alcoholism, and now went everywhere on his bike. Two of the town's bike shops were on West Street, an artery that stretched from the heart of downtown at Church Circle all the way out to the edge of town at Parole, where it split into several two-lane highways (at that time) headed generally westward. There were many riders and few cyclists among the commuters along that corridor.

Annapolis was mutilated  through the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st Century by car-centric transportation decisions that made cycling much more dangerous and unpleasant, and didn't really do all that much for motorists either. The areas that grew large buildings and sprawling parking lots drove the development. Road builders just did what they could to throw down pavement in straight lines to connect everything. Some of it reamed out existing roads, adding lanes and traffic lights. Some of it added roads to slam traffic into the existing corridors whether they were ready for it or not. Don't even ask whether they ever really could have been ready for it. All this makes life less pleasant for the recreational rider, and exponentially more dangerous for the cyclist of necessity.

One customer in Wolfeboro now, whose backstory and physical appearance indicate that he may have native Alaskan ancestry, bought a used bike from us to commute to his kitchen job at a local restaurant. A little while later he said that he had gotten a construction job for more money. But then he showed up again at the restaurant job, because the contractor he worked for required him to have a motor vehicle, but his income -- increased though it was -- wouldn't support the purchase and routine expenses of car ownership. Economically, the restaurant job was a better deal, because he could continue to use the affordable bicycle. It's not a great deal, but it's more survivable.

I ran the same calculation numerous times in my own life. I might have made a fraction more money in various editing jobs during the decline and fall of print media, but it would have required owning and using a car every working day, driving as much as a hundred commuting miles each day. The little bit more money would be absorbed and then some by the expenses required to go fetch it. Or I could sell out where I was living and go rent in the more expensive area where the jobs were, probably never able to scrape together the funds to buy back into the real estate market. The real estate market itself is a problem: I don't think I'm unique because I bought a house as a place to live, not as an investment. I didn't -- and don't -- care whether it appreciates in value. I just want it to shelter me. The built-in inflation of a capitalist mindset screws the lower end of the income scale even as it devours their lives for necessities they provide. The same is true of any growth mindset rather than a maintenance mindset.

Transportation riders who have to wait weeks to have worn out tires replaced don't get any help except from a charitable friend if they happen to have one. No one gets "bike stamps" to help them keep rolling. The people who get any subsidy have been in jobs where the company health plan pays them to buy fitness equipment so that their prosperity doesn't make them sick with the expensive ailments brought on by forced sitting and boredom snacking. The HMO reasons that subsidizing equipment now will mean that they don't have to fork out for costly medical care later. It's not benevolence, it's cost accounting.

The rise of e-bikes has led many cyclists of necessity to choose the motor vehicle over one powered by meat alone. It makes sense: they didn't want to be pedalers in the first place. We fix what we can for those riders as well, just as the shop in Virginia fixed The Yellow Bird. 1980 was the waning days of the 1970s moped boom that accompanied the bike boom. That shop had a dedicated moped department with its own mechanics, who enjoyed the motorized aspects. Now, as the smokeless moped has slipped in through the side door solely by forgoing internal combustion, bike shops are expected to embrace and understand them. And the worker bees who choose them don't even give them that much thought. It's just a bicycle, right? But with a motor! How cool is that? It's - like - perfect!

People are accustomed to the failure of their devices. The steady reduction of quality in every appliance has led to a culture that replaces rather than repairs. The "right to repair" movement runs hard into the fact that most things haven't been made to be fixed. Assemblies snap together in ways that break when you try to open them. The people who do fix things have to charge an amount of money that will support them, making the services too expensive for many of the people who need them the most: consumers of used equipment, nursing it through its declining years -- or months -- because it was all they could afford.

The bike industry embraced the disposable model within the first decade of this century.  Parts are gradually being withdrawn for what had been ubiquitous standards throughout the 1980s and '90s. Up until the past couple of years I could confidently tell a rider that an older bike could be maintained and modified relatively easily to suit individual tastes and needs. It's still true, but the options are narrowing. As a low-budget rider my whole life, I appreciated the fact that I could put together a high-quality, nice handling bike from scrounged parts. They might be scrounged new, but they were not bound to any other parts so closely that I had to buy an entire drivetrain to match. Working in a bike shop has given me the advantage of buying things at cost, but the disadvantage of a meager income. But even when I worked outside the bike industry I could shop sales, buy used items, and make targeted purchases of new stuff. The incremental upgrades to my primary bike led to the parts stash that would adorn the next bike. Tools and knowledge put me in a position to help other riders to put together and maintain their bikes for as long as they were interested. That wasn't usually very long.

The bike industry of the 1970s and most of the 1980s built bikes for the long term. Twenty years was a goal. It was a selling point. Same was true in backpacking and hiking gear. Buy good boots, take good care of them, and you could resole them for decades. It offset the discomforts some people experienced when breaking in a sturdy pair of leather boots. But industry observers figured out that most people don't stick with anything for that long. Products can be flashy and flimsier, sell better in the short term and head straight to the landfill. It clears the way for more products to roll out to enthusiasts who decide to reenlist, and newbies looking for the state of the art. Old gear doesn't mark you as a veteran, it stains you as a cheap old geezer too dumb to evolve with the times.

Sometimes, change really does represent improvement. This is certainly true in both cycling and outdoor gear. But in both cases the majority of change seems to be driven by the marketing and accounting departments more than by long-term users who want to spend more time out doing the thing rather than shopping to replace whatever just wore out or broke after a few months or a year. It puts us all on the conveyor belt of expensive replacement, not just the poor idiots who can't afford good boots. The upper echelons of consumers can still support the expense of replacement better than anyone struggling to stay equipped at all.

Without a car, I depended on my bike to get to whatever job I had. Even now, with a car, I depend on the significant amount of money I save by not using it. I have the car when I absolutely need it. And my life has been propped up by several lucky breaks. See earlier reference to how life isn't fair. The person who presents as a dirtbag or a weirdo and doesn't have the backstop of a few strokes of luck is not a lesser person solely based on that.

Assholes inhabit every level of socioeconomic status. This is why I don't embrace any automatic standards of brotherhood on that basis. And, oftentimes, the downtrodden are scarier people because of the ways in which they might act out their frustrations. The psychopathy of the rich tends to be more impersonal, perhaps even unconscious, in perpetuating the systems that create and maintain an underclass that might drag a beat up bike into a shop in search of aid. That "underclass" rider might not expect brotherhood from a place that serves an activity forced more and more into recreational areas, using ridiculously expensive machines to go stupidly slowly compared to motorcycles and ATVs.

We've had a few young guys put full suspension mountain bikes on layaway after they worked with a cheerful trail builder who tried and failed around here before packing up and moving on. He presented a welcoming and hopeful scenario to the kids who helped him lay out the first professionally designed and meticulously built trails in the area. But his business acumen didn't match his cheerful personality and artistic standards. The young guys failed to complete their layaways, and have not returned to try again. Perhaps they have been lured to other attractions. Perhaps they would come back if they could scrape up what it costs for a trailworthy bike.

Back in those 1950s and '60s of golden memory, even through the '70s, kids rode bikes until they could qualify for motor vehicles. The surge of adult cycling in the 1970s recast bike riding as potentially a lifetime activity for more people than the enthusiast base that existed before then. Changes in development through the 1980s progressively reduced the habitat of youth cyclists whose parents were being fed increasingly scary possibilities by media coverage of crimes both real and imagined.

I rode my bike on the streets wherever we lived, from about the age of six or seven. I was never hit by a car or even seriously honked at, from central Maryland to Rhode Island to mid-coast Maine and back to Maryland. The Miami area was a little hairier, but still overrun with riders. It wasn't until the later '70s that motorist hostility went from startling to expected. Others had worse luck. One of my cousins reported getting drilled in the back with a full beer can while riding in the Philadelphia area in the late '60s or early '70s. There were more than 100,000,000 fewer people in the country when I was a kid, and kids riding their bike to get around were a common feature.

We were supposed to outgrow it. That was the accepted model. Then grownups started filling the streets that were increasingly filling with the mere mass of assembled humanity. We were bound to piss each other off.This is the environment that riders of necessity are thrust into and that idiots like me choose to stay in. We may not share a common love of the machine and its simulation of flight, but we do share a common hope to survive each trip.

Microshops and Major Chains: Economies of Scale in the Bike Industry

 If anyone really gave a crap, that could be the title of a doctoral thesis or seminal study of the current state of bike retail economics. However, just as bicycles themselves are everywhere you look and yet often never seen until after the moment of impact, so does the sprawling global bicycle economy never outshine the public's concern with the global petroleum economy. I'm in the business, and even I can't be bothered to dig up statistics, if there are any, to support my observations.

Occasionally I will do a web search to see what bike shops are operating in a 50- to 100-mile radius, more or less. Who is still open? Who is new on the scene? From one search to the next, which of the new startups kept going? For most of the current century, I noticed small, very focused shops starting up in small towns that weren't always on major through roads. Some had luxurious looking websites while others were distinctly more quirky. At the same time, the consolidation trend among the major players had been driving big shops into more concentrated population areas. Most of the big shops are bike-only, but some multi-sport shops have managed to retain their accounts with Specialized or Trek, at least for now. With those two, you're only as good as your last quarterly sales figures. If you can keep up your representation while still selling downhill skis and hockey equipment, great.

Support from suppliers turned into demands for fealty way back in the 1990s. It wasn't complete and abrupt, so some of us managed to drag out the divorce, but seeing the end of the relationship as it played out in 2021, the path becomes clear. In the current climate, some small manufacturers have considerable prestige in their categories, but boutique builders are usually not for the poor and middle class. The major chain brands offer a full spectrum from the staggeringly expensive down to the pricey-but-approachable and cheesily equipped low end bikes. The microshop end of the retail spectrum may not be cheap, either, although their low overhead can allow for some very competitive prices if the sole proprietor can get by without hiring expensive help.

All help is expensive. As soon as a small shop needs a staff of more than one, overhead ratchets up. Each employee adds at least their payroll costs. On top of that, they cost money to train, and every staff member represents another chance that someone will make an expensive mistake, too. These days, with so many generations of parts and so much need for systems to be perfectly coordinated, it's really easy to order something that doesn't match, if you're in a hurry and trying to juggle too many responsibilities at once.

Because I wasn't a bike nerd from early in life, and I'm not much of one now, I learn new history every day from bike nerd social media. Often it's historical tidbits about small bike brands from back in the last century. Some were very small, artisan outfits. Others were small factory operations. From the late 19th Century into the early 20th, bikes played a solid role in European colonialism. Motorized vehicles weren't ubiquitous, so the force-multiplying capability of the bicycle made it a legitimate and respected tool. Bikes held a big role in citizen transportation in Europe and the UK through the end of the Second World War. Throughout the period, with the primary material being steel, production of bikes was highly scalable from a local builder up through big factory operations like Raleigh. Even in the US, before the explosion of affordable automobiles, bikes played utilitarian roles in areas where the distances covered and loads carried fit their small size and low horsepower.

Bikes illustrate the problem common to all human powered vehicles: the vehicles change shape depending on their intended use. You wouldn't take your $14,000 S-Works Tarmac to the downhill mountain bike course any more than you would show up at the nearest criterium on your $9,000 Trek Rail. And I just noticed: Mountain biking is still cheap fun! Only $9,000 as opposed to $14,000. That's a whopping five grand in your pocket to spend on beer or put toward a tricked-out van to drive to trail systems around the country. Those examples are less than a sliver of the variety of shapes and sizes of machine that can be called a bicycle. They do represent the challenge facing a shop because their support needs are quite different. You will spend a lot more money over the brief, tumultuous lifespan of your mountain bike than you will on the road bike in the same amount of time. Whoever does your maintenance and repairs has to be ready for you. Trash a rim so that the tubeless tires no longer seat? Thrash your rear suspension pivot bearings? Blow up a shock? Snap a derailleur hanger and bend a $750 rear derailleur? Gotcha covered! Maybe.

Granted, most riders don't fall into that price range, but occasionally someone will treat themselves to a really nice bike without considering the downstream -- or downhill -- costs of ownership. Even the mid range will take a bite out of your paycheck. And it all has to work pretty near perfectly, or it doesn't work at all. What you'll limp out of the woods on is one thing. What you'll put up with day after day in your chosen form of active leisure is something else entirely. That POS needs to shift cleanly. The dropper post needs go up and down like an elevator in a classy hotel. The rear suspension linkage can't be sloppy. All of the bike's joints need to move as smoothly as a leaping gazelle in the prime of life, before it becomes creaky lion bait. Someone has to keep that mechanism in satisfactory condition so that you can take it out in the dirt and pound on it again. Maybe that's you. Maybe that's someone else. Whoever it is needs tools, parts, and work space.

Forty-four years ago, when I got out of college and based my personal economy on using a bike for transportation, I realized that I couldn't count on a shop for repairs, because I had to leave for work before they were open and didn't get back from work until they had closed. Already steeped in a self-reliant philosophy from my early mentors, I invested in tools, and tried to keep commonly needed parts on hand. I wasn't likely to break anything unusual on my commutes, so I only needed inner tubes, maybe a tire, and cables. Racing, I might break something more unusual, but more likely it just picked up another battle scar and kept going. It wasn't until I rode in the local cyclocross series that I tore off a derailleur and learned about that little peril of trail riding.

I couldn't afford to ride mountain bikes these days. Not the way they're being ridden now, anyway. Biking was great for a working class person when the equipment was solid and simple, because the biggest expense really was the purchase of the bike itself. Learn to maintain it, and decades of fun stretched before you. When it moved off road, potential damage increased in frequency and expense, but a smooth rider might still enjoy many trail miles without having to fuss too much over maintenance or replace an expensive part. You had to work within the limitations of the simple equipment. More demanding riders pushed for better adaptive equipment to meet their needs, driving the costs up for everyone, and flushing casual participants out, or relegating them to crappy, cheap versions of the state of the art. Now your routine expenses include renewing your brake fluid and rebuilding hydraulics as necessary, replacing your tubeless tire sealant at the recommended intervals (LOL), and rebuilding your shocks at the appropriate times, on top of gear adjustments, chain lube. Fine if you're into that, but added costs that the ancestral bike never had.

All of these factors are widening that gap between the small specialist and the corporate cornucopia. In an area like ours, no longer truly rural, but still with a much smaller year-round population than summer population, survival depends on being able to exploit different revenue sources. Some of our winter customers are also summer customers, whether their primary residence is here or not, but a good percentage seems to come only for one season or the other. We couldn't survive as a bike-only shop, let alone as a narrowly focused category shop. In bike season we still have customers who need service in several bike categories, but we only have the same space and limited personnel to meet those needs when demand is at its highest. In bike stuff demand tends to go from nil to highest overnight some time in the spring, and remain near peak until late summer or early fall. I wouldn't have time to rebuild your entire suspension in peak season even if we did have the parts, tools, and dedicated work space. And in what you consider the off season, we're servicing a completely different set of customers with completely different workshop needs. So the fickle and needy bike customer looks elsewhere for quicker gratification.

In the outdoor outfitter store where I worked for a few years in the 1980s, we had some climbing hardware, an ice axe, and a few pairs of top-of-the-line full-shank leather boots. We almost never sold any of it, but customers looked for things like that as proof of our worthiness to sell them fabric-and-leather lightweight hikers, day packs, synthetic-fill sleeping bags, and cheap tents. It enhanced their shopping experience, and didn't cost us too much, because the equipment was changing fairly slowly at the time. Once in a while we would sell a pair of the heavy boots to someone who couldn't be talked out of them, even though they would have been better served to get a mid-weight, even if it was full leather, but that was very rare. Otherwise, they just stood proudly at the top of the boot display, showing that we really spoke mountaineering here.

In the bike business, browsers will judge the worthiness of a shop by what bikes and accessories are on display. Because the up front cost is much higher, and bikes are made obsolete every year by their manufacturers, we can no longer keep what we called drool bikes in stock to impress the tourists. If your drool bike is out of date, it makes you look as bad as if you didn't have it at all. I've had strangers greet me perfunctorily, cruise the lineup, and walk out with a smug smile. They don't want to engage until they've judged us by appearance. If we don't display whatever the secret token is, we're not worth their time. I'm not much of a people person, so I don't mind when someone doesn't want to talk, but as a clinical thinker, it provides me with information about the impression we create. Is it worth what we would have to pay to set a more attractive tableau for these browsers? The calculation never ceases, but so far the answer is no. We continue to hang on in the precarious gap, neither micro nor major, pulling in bare sustenance.

Good for nothing weather

 

 Wow! It's porn outside!

 Rain drummed on the roof. I heard the ice on the steep part shift as it moved closer to the edge. The temperature was 50 degrees (F), as it had been all night and for much of the previous day. The splashes in the driveway burst up almost on top of each other. What had been an almost unbroken layer of ice and compacted snow had turned to mud, except where it hadn't. As the temperature falls today, the remaining ice will set back up for the weekend. Within an hour, the sun had started to come out, but the air was still warm, and water flowed steadily from the roof.

This is Presidents' Day Weekend, the opening weekend of Massachusetts school vacation week. This is traditionally the biggest moneymaking period for New England ski areas if they didn't have a big Christmas week. Cross-country ski areas can't count on a big Christmas week the way downhill areas that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars -- or millions -- on snowmaking can. Our overhead is much lower, but we're at the mercy of the weather. In the past couple of decades, that weather has been increasingly merciless.

It all freezes up again this afternoon, but the damage is done. The trail system has been cut in too many places. The sections with usable snow are cut off by either bare ground or plates of ice that the tiller on the grooming machine can't reconstitute.

The fat bikers always pipe up about now to try to tell us that they are the answer. I will wearily dismantle that claim again as necessary. For instance: we might rent 30 or 40 sets of skis on a busy day. There is no way we could keep a fleet of 30 or 40 fat bikes. And our ski rental fleet is much larger than 30-40 sets. We have more than twice that many. The estimate of 30-40 pairs is a bit conservative. On a really crazy day we'll clear the rack and re-rent stuff wet to latecomers who are remarkably willing to put on boots that literally just came off of some stranger's sweaty feet.

The trail system can absorb far more skiers than bikers, as well. Skiers are much better equipped to slither past each other in a congested area, compared to rigid bicycles with 31-inch handlebars. So even if we flung the gates open wide and invited the bulbous crowd to cavort, it could look like the stampede scene from some movie about a cattle drive of longhorns.

Then there's cost: fat bikers who own their own will have shelled out somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 to $2,000 for their mounts, assuming that about half of them picked up a used one from some other rider who realized that it was more of an encumbrance than an asset and cut their losses. You can pay a lot more. In contrast, a new ski touring outfit costs about $400.You'll pay $400 just for studded tires for your fat bike. Used stuff is almost as hard to find as new stuff with the ongoing pandemic disruptions, but if you do find something it could be quite cheap. And skis just lean quietly in a corner when you're not getting to use them. They take up little more room than a furled umbrella.

Snowshoeing remains an option, but the popular perception of snowshoeing is weird. A snowshoe is just a boat to float you on the snow. The size is calculated to keep you from slogging in your bare boots, anywhere from knee deep to waist deep. The addition of traction devices to the bottom is more recent, to make traversing hard frozen sections safer and more convenient. But once "snowshoeing" became a discrete activity performed for its own sake, rather than as part of the general category of winter hiking, people started using them on shallow snow and firm frozen trails that most of us with experience in winter hiking would see as just good footing without the encumbrance of snowshoes. Lots of rock and ice, and irregular ground, takes a toll on snowshoes. They're designed to be supported by a fairly uniform resistance from the snow beneath them.

In the "anything for a buck" mentality of winter rental, upper management will still say, "well, you can snowshoe," but anyone experienced already knows better. You will be better served to use Microspikes or a similar device. We don't rent those. Maybe we should.

Just on the basis of canceled reservations, we've lost hundreds of dollars. That may not seem like much in a world that considers an operation with 500 employees to be a "small business." but in the realm of really small businesses like ours, it's somebody's paycheck for a week. Along with that go retail sales we might have made from the group when they visited the shop to get their rentals or drop them off, and losses to other businesses in town if most of the prospective visitors decide not to come here at all. And we lose the walk-ins and same-day last minute reservation calls we typically get on a Saturday or Sunday morning. There aren't enough fat bikers in the world to equal that head count.

Indoor trainers laugh indulgently. They may not even look out a window from November to March. The super cool computerized systems feed them the virtual experience at whatever level they can afford to simulate. But indoor training depends on fantasy life. If you're like me, and have no fantasy life anymore, indoor training is just torment. All that ever propelled me through periods of indoor training were bright daydreams of the myriad ways I was going to use that fitness on pleasurable challenges.

I do look forward to commuting season. Driving sucks. But it's hard to maintain a lot of trainer enthusiasm just based on that. I can nip out for a few base mile rides when actual commuting season seems imminent, and be good to go. Maybe I'll get on the rollers a couple or three times for old times' sake before that.

Shit, Garbage, and Old People

The three recession-proof economic sectors are sewage, refuse, and the elderly. The fourth is sick people, but rhetorical units of three are more powerful than four. And the sick and the elderly form a collective bloc that is exploited in basically the same way, by a unified industry.

You'd think that food would be recession-proof, because everyone needs to eat, but food production and distribution are vulnerable to too many variables. Once the food gets eaten, however, it becomes a much more uniform product. It all runs downhill. The money is in directing the flow and processing the effluent. It's going to happen. I used to see that on a bumper sticker.

Trash in the industrial age became a trickier problem than it was when everything was more readily biodegradable, and there were fewer people chucking it. Even in areas that don't go in for a lot of fancy attempts at recycling, someone needs to dig a hole, transport unwanted items to the hole, and dump them into it. Strip away the illusions from a lot of our waste management programs and you eventually come to a hole anyway. Trucks full of rubbish drive up, unload, and trundle back out again for another load, because we keep unwrapping things. Even when it seems like no one can afford to buy anything, trash keeps spontaneously generating. Most of the products we buy are just trash in waiting.

In this intricately connected world, almost everything seems to pass through the bike shop eventually. In our own little refuge we get money that came from trash and money that came from sick and old people. The shit business is a bit more compartmentalized, because sewage treatment facilities are usually overseen by government entities at some level, even if the design, building, and operation are done by contractors. However, in an area with a lot of septic tanks, a go-getter can buy the right kind of truck and build up a client list. And then there's the portable toilet business. "Your 'business' is our business."

Sick and old people are just another waste product of society. Depending on the age and the severity of the illness, a sick person might be returned to functionality as a tool or a cog in the machinery of society. As for the rest of them, we care for them out of what? Compassion? Superstition? Empathy? All the above. Imagine yourself in need of care or at least of comfort as you fade out. We hang onto people for a number of reasons. While they're in need, a good businessman can rake in a bundle from whoever pays their bills. At the end, a funeral industry takes care of the body. Somehow it doesn't seem quite as lucrative as the big three, but it's kin to both shit and garbage.

With this in mind, we the living take the cash that flows and feed the system with ourselves. If someone comes in dripping money, is it wise to question where it came from?

No one looking at my life choices would ever accuse me of being wise.

Bike infrastructure in a certain self-absorbed lakeside village just got a serious shot in the arm from a "health care" executive who has blithely pledged a half a million dollars for an ambitious construction program centered entirely on mountain biking, with a few enhancements for path riding, mostly to help connect the mountain bike facilities. So far it seems to do diddly crap for road users. It's hard to help road riders. Real transportation infrastructure is a vast circulatory system with many user groups vying for priority consideration of their wants. But if the grand plan for youth opportunity relies on kids being able to ride their bikes to the various places to practice their skills, they're going to need safe ways to get there. Who knows? Some of the little whippers might also discover that they'd like a bike that doesn't feel like such a pig on the pavement. More likely they just hang tough until they get their driver's licenses, so they can buy a truck and haul their toys to various venues near and far.

The trail and parks plan will improve the fortunes of a friend of mine in the business of designing and building such things. He gave up the road a long time ago, probably back at the end of his paper route years. An intrepid adventurer and energetic worker, he knows what he likes, and participates in trickle-down economics with few qualms about the ethics of the funding. Does it matter that you're not making the world as a whole a better place as long as you're making your own neighborhood more fun for yourself and your own kind? "People" to most people usually means "people like me."

The funding will get filtered through a 501(c)(3) non-profit, so that the benevolence is tax-deductible. Being nice should always make business sense. Big philanthropy is just tax evasion with good PR.

When it comes to funding, I started asking way too early in life, "Whose blood is this?" I couldn't always trace it very far, and you have to get money from somewhere. My jobs grew out of my interests and knowledge. In the yacht business and related industries you're in a world completely dependent on disposable income, but growing up in the culture made it seem normal. Lots of worker bees toiled away in the industry and supporting institutions. I was one of them for a few years, before my interest in human powered exploration drew me away from the shore.

If you're not prepared to bite the hand that feeds you, you are not free. That being said, wolves, coyotes, and feral dogs live hard lives and get shot at, while lap dogs and useful breeds get vet care and comfy beds. If Wolfeboro turns into a mountain biking destination, it may improve the shop business, or it may just draw competitors more cynical and less concerned, to finish trampling our aging bodies into the dirt. The overall family behind this current benefactor is already well on the way to turning the town into their own little theme park as it is. On the one hand, we're all a bit grateful to them for subsidizing local landmarks that were no longer able to survive as independent entities in today's economy. On the other hand, it brings us inexorably closer to being members of their household staff, at least indirectly.

Little towns live on their looks these days. Just in this area you can see the ones favored by their bone structure and complexion enjoying the attentions of sugar daddies, while the ones less blessed have to make do with the more frequently abusive relationships offered by rougher companions. There hasn't been much of a real economy in rural New England in decades. As the big forest products industries pulled out and abandoned their extensive timberlands, recreational uses have struggled to pick up the slack. The forest survived as a cash crop. The long harvesting cycle allowed people to play on quite a bit of it between cuts. As that stability has dwindled, the locals figure out ways to pimp out the local attractions to transients who will pay to use them.

In towns that had long ago abandoned resource extraction, where small industry had faded out, the economy has depended on attracting people with money who just like it there. Since the alternative is complete collapse, judgement is suspended. Only a rare idiot will look beyond and wonder what would keep us all afloat on a longer term basis if the current system of enabling the wealthy and tickling them for a trickle eventually runs out of fuel.

$15 an hour

 Proponents of trickle-up economics make a compelling case for raising the minimum wage from the current (and longstanding) $7.25 an hour to a comfortable $15. Put money into the hands of workers at the bottom to create a more solid foundation to our economy. It also has considerable humanitarian benefits, but those don't even have a line item at the accounting department. If you can't make your case monetarily in some way, it will fail. Even environmental protection has to resort to cost-benefit analyses of open space versus a cancerous sprawl of raped land. Oh yeah, clean air and water, those are good. Now let's dump this mining waste down this conveniently located stream.

If the minimum wage gets raised to $15 an hour, I will get the most significant raise of my entire working life. I know, what was I thinking? All that shit about never giving up on your dreams runs insidiously into the day to day creep of advancing age, until one day you realize that it may never be too late to hit it big (whatever that means) but that in all likelihood you will die destitute after either a period of extreme poverty or a serious illness that you can't afford to treat. In my defense, I did occasionally tap into freelance income that looked promising before another blowdown or washout interrupted progress.

Kill your dreams, kids. Kill them before they kill you. Know when to quit and quit hard. Either that or turn your back instantly on anyone who hinders your single-minded attention to whatever far-fetched notion of creative success you envision. And you still run greater odds of failure than success. Do your best to enjoy the process in either case.

While the rising tide of higher wages will lift most boats, it will sink some of them. This is not a reason not to do it. But some small businesses won't be able to pay that well on the limited revenues they bring in. They will have to restructure to find the right size, which could mean growing, or shrinking, right down to vanishing completely.

The shop I work for already has to manage a broad array of financial stressors. Until 2020 triggered a truly unprecedented level of interest in what we sell, both the bike and cross-country ski business were gradually dying. Cross-country skiing, dependent as it is on natural snow and reliable winter weather, was suffering worse than biking. Biking masked its decline behind category sales, while the real freedom represented by the road bike of the 1970s and '80s and the mountain bikes of the early boom has eroded greatly. Mountain biking mutated into a sport of staggeringly expensive toys operated mostly on engineered courses. Road biking has similarly chased high dollars, while the open road remains a hazardous venue. Separated infrastructure is just another prison, part of the ghettoization of cycling. Move the undesirables into a separate enclave, preferably contained by a fence. Spend millions to go to fewer places than the road, and if someone complains, call them an ingrate. And that's only in places that have scraped up the investment. Elsewhere it's just a free-for-all.

Our clientele consists mainly of people who would see no personal benefit from raising the minimum wage. Whether they want the modern expensive stuff or not, their buying decision doesn't hinge on their hourly income. In the broader area from which we draw, we have customers who will enjoy better finances, but their improved circumstances might lead them away from bikes entirely. Just giving people more money does not mean that they will spend it on what we offer.

I've written ad nauseam about the challenges faced by outpost shops like ours, and many others beyond the reach of powerful retail chains. Each one finds tendrils of support unique to its area. Major suppliers, meanwhile, follow the understandable practice of courting large accounts and using them as the basis by which to judge all others. If a big company makes concessions on unit price for complete bikes they sell to small, independent shops, they still won't support their marvels any better with parts and tools.

A small shop that can't afford to stuff a warehouse with widgets stockpiled against future obsolescence can't offer as strong a service department to the technolemmings who come looking for bargain-priced expertise. And they'll let you know when you don't impress them sufficiently. The classic case was a local trust funder who breaks things a lot. His propensity, combined with the increasingly temperamental nature of modern componentry, led us to some long and complex repairs before he quit bringing anything to us. He came back from one of his many well-funded voyages to somewhere or other to tell us, "I checked with a shop where they really know what they're talking about..." Are we really ignorant, or am I just really bad at confirming his biases for him? I'm never going to get good at confirming his biases.

Because the tech-obsessed represent an increasing portion of the market for recent stuff, but millions of old bikes remain in service, the tech crowd looks for sophistication on demand, while the majority of riders still just need reliable service on their simple machines. Frankly, I'm with them. Technological inequality is a perfect metaphor for income inequality. Back in the olden days, bikes were very similarly designed across the whole price spectrum. You paid more to get something lighter weight, of better metals, more precisely machined and finished. But your mid-price bike might actually handle pretty nicely, so you could enjoy riding at your price point.

With modern componentry, lower-priced bikes have trashily-made versions of the expensive stuff -- which is itself pretty trashily made. Nothing is intended to last, even if it is intended to hold up to heavy levels of abuse during its short lifetime. If you take good care of your stuff, respecting its vulnerabilities as well as its strengths, expect to pay a lot and undergo a long treasure hunt when you finally need suspension or hydraulics rebuilt. And that's on top of the ongoing expense you will incur with tubeless tires and brake fluid.

Why does this matter to a $15 an hour minimum wage? Overhead expenses. A shop needs to have tools, parts, work fixtures, and perishable fluids on demand for the needy technolemming. As "luxury" features like hydraulic disc brakes are used to fluff up the showroom appeal of mid-price bikes, increasing numbers of riders get recruited to run off the cliff because they didn't know that they should refuse to, and might not have had a viable alternative. A big shop in a heavily populated area can absorb more of these changes as part of its overall financial existence. Well-kept tools will last. Mechanics can be trained in procedures, and get better with practice. A large facility can set aside dedicated space for time-consuming projects that require extreme cleanliness, like anything to do with hydraulics. You can do the work in a clearing you stomp out in the middle of a mucky swamp, but you need to defend that clearing until the job is done. In a small shop, that can tie up a bench for a while, preventing other work from getting done.

Repair type is unpredictable, as is repair volume. No one saw last year's stampede coming. We can expect in general that bike work will pick up in April and run in fairly high waves until late summer. Last year it hit earlier and stayed at flood levels until late summer, tapering gradually into autumn. However, the well-documented shortages of parts hampered our ability to get these riders up and running. Those shortages persist as we roll inexorably closer to the new season.

Meanwhile, Specialized imposed a drastic price increase on bikes already ordered, but not shipped. As of February 1, anything that hadn't left the warehouse automatically jumped in price, even if it was a prepaid special order the Big S had themselves been unable to fulfill. We ordered in good faith. Have a kick in the teeth, little guy! Specialized makes the case that they are squeezed by price increases from their suppliers, and other expenses. A price increase was inevitable. But a small shop subsisting on special orders for high end bikes has to negotiate the increase with the customers who thought that they'd already satisfied the financial part of the transaction, and had only to wait patiently for it to arrive and be assembled. If someone digs their heels in, we have to decide whether to eat the loss or refuse the bike and eat a bigger loss. A loss is a loss. You don't stay in business by operating in the red. Maybe we should start laundering money... The problem is that we got into the bike business because we liked bikes, not business. The more complicated the business gets, the more life it eats for diminishing psychic and emotional reward. The accounting department rolls its eyes. Get the money, by any means necessary!

You may wonder how I can claim to live on such meager pay and still go to the dentist and pay to be tortured. The fact is, about all I spend money on is my teeth, my eyeballs, and two aging cats. My car is so old I expect the frame to collapse every time I get into it. I figure if I can chew my food and see where I'm going I'll be able to cheat the reaper for a while longer. My life choices were guided in part by a resolve to explore the satisfaction of life on a modest income, anticipating that if the global economy ever did get adjusted to make a fairer distribution of proceeds, no one would be upper middle class anymore, let alone wealthy. The more satisfied a person could be with less, the better off they would be. The bike as I found it was an excellent element of such a lifestyle. The bike as the industry has made it is just another expensive toy. And minimum wage is just a number. Somewhere outside of our fantasy economy is a real world in which money has to represent actual value of goods or services, and those goods and services have to support basic survival. The number could be anything: $1 a week, $50 a minute, as long as it relates to the real necessities that form the foundation and framework of a sustainable society.

Stimulate the US economy.

A meme going around now tells people to "stimulate the US economy, not China's. Buy American-made goods! Shop at American businesses." This ignores the fact that American corporate leadership made the decision decades ago to move manufacturing to countries with lower labor and environmental standards, because American workers were insisting on a better deal from management, and American citizens didn't want to live in a toxic hellhole. So the owners of  manufacturing exported the misery and filth. Along with it went the paychecks.

The drop in living standards in this country was not immediate. Overseas production made products cheaper. Credit cards made buying too easy. A person could still aspire to move up the pay scale and get a cushier job, so the loss of manufacturing jobs was less apparent unless you happened to live in a factory town that collapsed within weeks after the major employer shut down. Most people only think about the relationship of job to paycheck. Take money, purchase necessities. Use money left over to purchase non-essentials. Yeah, you should save some, but in the 1980s, interest on savings plummeted, and lots of people went too far with their credit cards. A series of recessions were largely caused by excess consumer debt. I don't know what the official explanation was, but looking from the sidelines it appeared that people got overextended, pulled back, recovered a bit, and began to spend again. We end up living on the expanding shell of a hollowed-out economy because nothing has a basis in reality.

The current disease crisis brings us face to face with essential reality. What do you need? Water, food, shelter, and varying degrees of social interaction and cooperation. The social aspects can be described as love and belonging, esteem, and self actualization, but those are outgrowths of your ability to contribute to and receive physiological needs. I won't say that you don't need them. Even an introvert likes to have a friend or two.

Water depends on a clean environment and control of corporate interests that would privatize the resource and profit from its distribution. Can you say Nestlé? Food depends on clean agriculture and a dispersed food production system that puts sources near end users as much as possible. Agricultural land has been devoured by suburban sprawl. Zoning and community association rules restrict or forbid gardening in some places. There are economic advantages to operations of a certain size. Any size garden requires time and attention that you have to take from other things. Some are more commercially viable than others.

Shelter depends on affordability. It also depends on finding a suitable site. Settlements used to depend on the availability of water and food. If something else drew a population, like a mineral mine in a desert, the money generated by the mine could pay for the import of necessities not provided by the local environment. The same is true of a manufacturing facility that might need a higher population than a region was able to support with its naturally occurring resources. The ability and willingness to transport food formed the basis for factory farming in the first place. So did the ability to redirect whole rivers to irrigate places with sunshine, but little water.

Once we got in the habit of moving things around to suit ourselves, it was easy to believe that we could get away with more and more of it, playing musical chairs until suddenly the music stopped, as it did last month. And here we are.

The bike business has always been international. In the 1970s road bike boom, European component companies dominated the spec, even on the flagship of American bike building, the Schwinn Paramount. The Paramount was everything that the rest of the Schwinn line was not: lightweight, butted tubing, lugged frames with French Nervex lugs, made-in-Italy Campagnolo dropouts,  and Campy componentry. The rest of the boom depended on either European or Japanese companies using European or Asian parts. There hadn't been a complete American bike industry since the end of the 19th Century, more or less. There still isn't. Nor does there have to be.

We're human beings living on a finite globe. The economy is not a battleground. The war analogy works nicely for capitalist emperors stirring up their troops, but you can't push problems around a globe without shoving them up your own ass sooner or later. The time is now. Lube up. The reckoning has arrived. You want the economy to improve in this country? Support improvements in the country where your jobs went. Make labor more expensive over there, so that over here doesn't look so bad anymore. Either that or go, hat in hand, to the corporate powers in this country and say that you're willing to work for shit wages for them, as the better alternative to having no wages at all. Admit that upward mobility was always a long shot, more of a myth than a reality. Keep voting that their taxes should be nonexistent. Keep agreeing that they have no obligation to the nation in return for the money that they hoard in tax shelters and dribble out in charitable gestures to causes that appeal to them. Let the air be brown again, and the rivers catch fire. Good times, man.

Improvements in manufacturing technology are making more and more people obsolete. Even the people in high tech careers find themselves dangling over the abyss, at risk of obsolescence and unemployment. There are too many of us already for the majority to count on achieving relaxing lifestyles. Priorities are going to change. The basics are going to start looking pretty good.

The burden of ownership

Thinking more about why the bike industry needs to have more self respect, reasons for that all stem from the increasing complexity and technological vulnerability of the machines themselves. Bikes not only cost more to buy, they cost more to own. They require more vigilance from their owners. Owners can do their own inspection and maintenance or they can purchase it.

In 1979, when I emerged from years of schooling and started going to various jobs, I used a bicycle for transportation, to keep my overhead costs as low as possible. I became my own mechanic because I had access to good instruction and I could maintain my vehicle easily, even in a rented room or a small apartment. My expansion into racing was a matter of convenience. I owned a sporty bike and was riding a lot. Why not compete a little?

Competing a little soon answered that question. Racing can mess you up and destroy your bike. It's like taking the family station wagon to a "run what you brung" event and wrecking it because you're not as good in the corners as you thought you were. But in the case of bike racing you could end up unemployed for eight or ten weeks because you crumpled more than the bike.

Regardless of the odd mishap, it was very affordable to build a bike, and another bike, and another bike... I only went to a shop to buy parts, tools, and bike-specific clothing and shoes. Required maintenance was fairly quick and easy, even if I had to do a complete overhaul. I soon learned to do the overhauls in stages: hubs one week, bottom bracket another week...

Among the useful changes to componentry in the 1990s, Shimano (yes, that Shimano) provided sealed cartridge bottom brackets that you can basically ignore for years. Of course they've "improved" cranks and bottom brackets since then and made life more expensive and difficult, but you can still get the BB UN55 if you have ancient, contemptible square-taper cranks. If you're not such an animal that you can feel how much power you're losing because you don't have a big, hollow crank axle, you can still have hours of fun for a minimal investment.

Early adopters of the bicycle in the 1890s discovered this concept with the simple machines of the time. Up front cost was a bit steep, but ownership cost was quite low, as long as you didn't hit a pebble and get slammed into the gravel from high atop your wheel. Heck, even then a low-budget rider could crawl off and lick his wounds, healing like an animal, much as the uninsured do today in this great land of ours.

Even a simple bicycle can suffer damage beyond the ability of a home mechanic to repair. I've had several frame repairs done by my friend the torch wizard. Without her skills, I would have had to find someone locally or, more likely, have scrounged a frame and transferred parts to it. You'll find frame builders in surprising places, so it's worth asking around. Steel frames can be brought back from some pretty drastic looking damage. Expect to pay for that. Scrounging is generally cheaper.

Carbon frames can also be repaired. I still don't want to deal with carbon's idiosyncrasies, but at least it isn't the disposable material we were led to believe it was as it was emerging as the dominant choice in high performance bikes.

The more moving parts in a system, the more things there are to wear out. The more proprietary parts, the more you depend on a manufacturer to provide replacements. We don't have the after market parts network that automobiles have. You can't just nip down to the parts store and give them year, make and model.

The more complicated the bike and the more it depends on perfect precision, the harder it is for the home hobbyist to cut out the pros and save money by doing the work themselves. You will need to pay the repair shop and wait for them to get to it. Sometimes it's quick. Often it's not, especially during the season when everyone wants their bikes. For every sophisticated function that you gain, you lose independence. You lose accessibility. You lose the durability that simplicity brings.

Humanity voted with its wallet for this. Increased expense and complexity won the popularity contest. Everything costs more because most people were fine with it. You own it now. Can you afford it?

Disposable Income

Watching a recorded video of the Wolfeboro, NH, selectmen's meeting from Wednesday, Jan. 8, several things struck me about the public comments regarding the shared use policy drawn up to accommodate fat bike riders in the winter.

Several skiers made excellent points about the negative impact that bike riders will have on the ski experience. I made the point before about the irreducible width of 31-inch handlebars. There's also the emotional impact of having to share trails with people working way too hard to go way too slowly, getting incomplete exercise while adding sizable flotsam in the form of their oversized bikes.

A couple of people in support of the bikes made the comparison -- almost entirely incorrectly -- between fat bikes on Nordic trails and snowboarders on downhill ski areas.

First off, alpine skiers and snowboarders are both gravity-dependent sliders on snow. Throw fat bikes onto a downhill ski area and then you have a comparison. By the way, alpine skiers were none too fond of Telemark skiers either. The rhythm of free-heel skiing, within the limits of the gear of the time, made our paths a bit more meandering than your locked-down, fully-mechanized alpine skier would follow. We didn't gouge things up the way the one-plankers did, but we still got in the way of modern progress. Telemarkers cured the problem by turning their gear into what was essentially alpine skis and boots. Snowboarders cured their problem by simply being too numerous to ignore. Needing the money, the downhill areas caved in and sold out. The snowboarders do have a negative effect on the snow surface, but downhill areas are such a mosh pit anyway that lift riders have learned not to care. It's just a theme park.

Proponents of the fat bike revolution tell the cross country skiers that they will be fine just as alpine skiers were fine. It's a nice way of saying that your time is up and you have to watch yourself being replaced by this new thing that is really different from your thing, that requires all the concessions from the skiers, until skiing finally dies out. This is the wave of the future. Resistance is useless.

It's a bit like deciding whether to go ahead and welcome the Panzer battalions or let the invaders machine gun and shell a bunch of you first.

At least two commenters referred to Wolfeboro as becoming a mountain bike and fat bike Mecca. They contend that this is the only thing that will attract "a younger demographic with more disposable income" to the area.

Actually, some jobs would be a really good start. People came here in the 1980s in droves and hordes because land rape was going full bore, and anyone even pretending to be a builder was basically printing money. But many of the people who moved here became super commuters, driving hours at each end of a work day to get to their jobs in Massachusetts and the southernmost parts of New Hampshire. You have to be young to pull off a schedule like that. Other jobs proliferated in the school system, to service the kids that accompanied the influx, which drove taxes up sharply. Peripheral trades, notably landscaping and property care, also saw a boom. Year-round residents use fewer of those services than the second home crowd does.

People quit mountain biking around here around the turn of the century. A few continued. Others have resumed it as various midlife experiences impel them that way. But disposable income had become much more of a requirement.

In the 1980s and '90s, you didn't need a huge amount of money to ride mountain bikes. A mountain bike used to be something you could use to go somewhere. Now it's something you go somewhere to use. You can drop a thousand bucks just on a car rack to carry your fleet of behemoths to your chosen venue. Or you can fake something up, if you're handy with tools. But you'll need more than a thousand dollars per bike per category to get a bike that's reasonably well made and sort of durable. Two thousand a bike is a safer estimate. When everyone was mountain biking in the late 20th Century, it wasn't about the money, it was about the fun: accessible fun that anyone could join. Mountain biking is definitely no longer that.

The people who are riding now, or have returned to riding, are earning comfortable salaries at various things that pay comfortable salaries. They can afford to sit and chat for hours in a place that charges $6 for a single glass of beer. In a way, it's always been true, that the well-off only have to wait a little while for poor upstarts to fall away. Being really good at riding your bike does not provide a pathway to secure long-term income. So the well-funded hobbyist reigns supreme at the recreational side of riding.

The unanswered economic question is whether there are enough well-funded hobbyists to offset the costs of trying to pander to them.

The bike addicts can't level the same charge at cross-country skiers. A crazy top-end ski set might run you more than a grand, but you can do quite well for less. Then it's just a matter of stick time. Go out every day you possibly can, for 30 minutes or an hour, and you can put a serious hurt on posers with expensive gear and no training. Or, if you're not afflicted with competitiveness, you can just enjoy the benefits of the world's most complete exercise and let the neurotics chase each other around.

I guarantee that the median income of our old mountain bike group was half of what it is for the current group, even adjusting for inflation. No one says "whoever dies with the most toys wins" anymore, but they certainly exemplify it.

Here's the thing about a young crowd with disposable income: they get older. You look at the cross-country ski trails, you see people of all ages. Yes, a lot of the them are pretty darn old. But whole families can take it up and keep doing it with fairly minimal investment for decades. How many people in their 60s and up will be spending what's left of their disposable income on mountain biking? And who will replace each wave of the young and affluent as they age out?

As consumer society and car culture flame out in their final frenzy, all forms of human powered transportation face deadly competition on the public right of way. Human powered transportation and recreation would have provided tremendous lifestyle benefits for those of us with lesser means, if we had acknowledged as a species how limited our means actually are. But we're still drunk with the excesses of more than a century of expanding resource exploitation, reinforced and amplified by our collective fantasy life played out on screens large and small. What is the true cost of that disposable income?

Lean in until your face hits the ground

In the early 1980s, I worked for a sail loft. Every winter, at the beginning of January, we went on overtime, six days a week, ten hours a day. As a sailor, I thought of the sailing season as the busy season. It hadn't occurred to me that people would get more work done on vital equipment like the sails themselves when the boat was laid up for the winter. As soon as it was dumped on me, it seemed obvious. For many weeks during winter service, the loft crew worked like zombies, wending our way through towering piles of Dacron. The ceiling in our building was low, which made the mountains of varying whiteness seem even more immense. New cloth was dazzling under the glare of fluorescent lights. Old sails looked like old snow, in varying shades of gray.

In the short daylight of winter, with years of life ahead of me, I could burrow into the tunnel of work without too many distractions. The glaciers of sailcloth ground slowly across the landscape until the meltdown in early spring. As the days lengthened and outdoor life beckoned, work receded to grant more time.

This spring at the shop, the repair load has been a little heavier than in recent years, and we're down to one and a half mechanics. El Queso Grande has recovered enough from surgery to be able to wrench carefully, but he also still has to run the business. And with only two of us on duty on any given day, any influx of customers brings service work to a halt. It has created a mini version of the winter service overload. The difference is that it is hitting during the rise of daylight, when life outside the building calls strongly. I'm also decades older. "Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste," as the song goes. Life outside that particular building always calls strongly. It was different when we were the bartenders at the months-long party that was bike season. Now we're just aging servants for competing aristocracies.

I got talked into giving up one of my days off last week, to try to get ahead a little on the repair load. Not only did it barely make a dent in the waiting pile, it completely screwed me up for the rest of the week. I slid into quitting time on the last day basically face down. As much as I sense that I am supposed to be ashamed for taking time off, we're talking about irreplaceable life here.

El Queso Grande refers to my days off as "vacation." A good servant of the cult of the workaholic, he has absorbed the philosophy that if work is good, overwork is better. If he'd lucked into something more lucrative than the cross-country ski and bike industries he might actually take time off himself, and delegate more of the mucking out to the flunkies. But the country as a whole suffers from the perception that we should all be working harder and longer, rather than figuring out how we can all be helping each other to work less. Many hands make light work, says the proverb, but in the world we have created, many hands make depressed wages and high unemployment.

I look out the shop window at drivers coming and going from the deli out back, or poaching our parking lot to go to other businesses nearby. The trucks are big and loud, with large-bore exhaust pipes belching fumes as the vehicles are left idling. I get to read the stickers on people's vehicles, waving fists of defiance against any calls for restraint. I watch us lose the long, slow-motion war into which my generation was born, to which most of my peers surrendered. Their children and their children's children show increasing conflict, not increasing convergence, but they all drive. Drive, drive, drive. Does it matter whether the driver that runs you into the ditch was distracted or hostile? Just going to work, by any mode, is stressful and depressing. And then I'm at work, solving problems that are sometimes interesting, but that add up to a big fat zero -- as far as I can tell -- in the conflict of values playing out nationally and globally.

Based on the entirety of human history, this can't end well, and will probably end soon. Wealth has always been concentrated, so any attempt to spread it around always has to assure the holders of it that it will always technically be theirs. And any attempt to improve the quality of life in general has to be framed around profitability. Forget that profit has no basis in nature, where breaking even is the ideal. Humans can imagine times of shortage and compete for things that haven't happened yet. Humans can create shortage to manipulate markets, and exploit misfortunes both accidental and manufactured.