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.

Some dildo on a road bike, and other workshop trivia

 I had not yet had occasion to unwrap a set of these bars. Be the "envy" of your ride group. This manufacturer has an eccentric way of securing the bar tape at the end of the drops.

The mushroom cap is permanently affixed. After you make the first wrap at the end of the bar on your way to spiral up to the tops, the flexible cap flips down into the position you see here. Below shows the cap in the open position as I prepared to remove the old bar wrap.

 

 

In no particular order, here are other observations and problems solved:

Short rider with small frame complained about her basket dragging on the tire. I remembered that we'd salvaged this little front rack that attaches to the cantilever brake bosses. It actually fit without interference from some other component. Always nice when something works as intended. Advantage to rim brakes.

Here's a rarity: Back when Shimano first entered the rotating shifter market, they actually made changing a cable easy. They soon spotted their error, and the later models are almost impossible to open at all. They love to make puzzle boxes out of their shifters.

And now a reminder of why I hated crank arm dust caps. They almost invariably ended up bonded to the crank arm so thoroughly that they needed to be chiseled out. Or, if you were lucky, one or both of them fell out and disappeared. Good riddance. Especially in the early mountain bike era, anything that stood between you and checking your crank arm bolts was a bad idea. From the late 1980s through much of the 1990s, we replaced an uncounted multitude of left crank arms for riders who hadn't kept up with that vital bit of regular maintenance. The coming of socket-head crank bolts with no dust cap significantly reduced the problem, which freed up the bike industry to devote more attention to creating many other problems for their addicts loyal customers.

While we're in the neighborhood of the crank, this Shimano replacement crank displays a copious application of the pus-like grease that congeals into earwax in early versions of their under-bar pod shifters for mountain bikes.

A little grease on the threads of a crank bolt and under the flange of the head of it is a good idea to help torque it down. But this much grease is way too much. It will get onto the flats of the square tapered bottom bracket axle, compromising the security of the crank arm. Shimano started advising techs to grease the drive side flats of their cartridge BBs in the 1990s during The Great Cheapening, because over-tightening the crank arm against the face of the BB bearings  -- while bad for the crank arm and less secure overall -- helped hold the basically defective design of the bearings in place. While the design of the cartridge BBs has been quietly improved without acknowledging fault, the practice of over-greasing right crank arms remains. Left crank arms -- the ones that fall off more often if bolts aren't properly torqued -- remain completely neglected by them. It falls to individual mechanics to clean up after them and install things correctly to survive for as long as possible in a throwaway society. Do not grease the flats of square tapered bottom bracket axles. Do grease the threads of crank arm bolts. That is all.

A customer attempting to keep a used bike in service brought in his $25 great thrift store find. It was a Schwein mountain bike from the last few moments when Schwinn almost pulled back from the brink of collapse with some decent and well-reviewed machines. The bike he bought was one of the lower-end models, but still a decent platform to fix up and use for a bit of fun cruising and retro trail riding. There was just this mysterious bit of duct tape wrapped around one fork leg...

You may have spotted the guilty secret concealed in a sliver-gray wrapper, but below it is shown fully revealed:

 The fork leg was completely broken. All that held things together was the tape around the outside and the internal parts of the cheap suspension. Silver tape. What can't it do? 

Specialized was kind enough to send us one of the three ebikes we had ordered prepaid back in January. 

What do you think? Do they want me to update the firmware? They have a groovy website where we're supposed to connect with all of the electronic brain stuff. After we updated that interface as directed, the screens we got in the firmware updating process didn't look like the examples in their help and guidance area, and it was never clear whether we had actually succeeded, or if the bike didn't really need it after the hysterical admonitions of the included printed material. 

To compound the annoyance, this expensive machine came in a smudge-attracting matte mint green. Matte finishes are stupid. Light-colored matte finishes are downright sadistic.

The workshop continues to be buried in repairs. El Queso Grande declares that he's never seen anything like it in his almost 50 years in the business. I still wonder if it only seems worse because we can't fill our staffing needs. Leafing through a journal from 2005, when we still had Ralph, I found an entry referring to how buried the workshop was during the early summer rush. EQG likes to go on short conservative rants about the corrosive effects of government generosity and the shabby work ethic of teenagers, but the reason that we can't hire people right now is that they think the work is dirty, complicated, and boring. And they're right. Any youngster thrilled by the new stuff will have no patience for the old stuff. Anyone not thrilled by some aspects of bikes or the bike business won't be lured in by the awesome salary, high prestige, and sex appeal.

 REMEMBER: THIS NEVER HAPPENS

EQG is undefinably agitated by the incentives some employers are offering to entice people to sign on with them. He mentions seeing reports on the news of college tuition incentives, bonuses, and prizes. He rightly asserts that a little place like ours can't compete with inducements like that. But once the novelty of the perqs wears off, you're still left having to do the actual job. And I don't think anyone in our immediate area is offering anything like that anyway.

The young whiz kids are great and all, but a fully functioning bike shop still needs some poor old gray-haired bastard who's pissed away his life at this, and has simply seen a lot of stuff. Or the bike business in general has to cut its ties to its past and leave the maintenance of the derelict hulks still in service to the back street and home garage outfits where someone has the tools and knowledge and can be bothered to use them.

The good news, if you could call it that, is that the pandemic bike boom is already winding down. The lack of bikes to buy has now become widely known, so anyone whose interest was marginal already will be looking for something else to do. Anyone who remains interested still faces a treasure hunt that could yield nothing. No bike means no new participant. It may not be the bike industry's fault exactly, but it's still their loss. Also, with the reopening of many activities and venues that had been unavailable during the height of pandemic restrictions, people are returning to their established preferences as much as possible. Those preferences had verifiably not included biking. With the exception of ebikes, which are really a low level of motor vehicle, the bike industry was not growing, regardless of what the evangelists of mountain biking will tell you.

A low-end ebike will provide more satisfactory performance to a budget-minded customer than a low-end mountain bike will. Neither is a particularly good investment, but the low-end mountain bike is pretty well guaranteed to be beaten into junk within a couple of months of vigorous trail riding. A cheap ebike, with care, might last for years. Thus the two categories belong pretty exclusively to the higher income brackets. It remains to be seen how long higher income brackets will remain viable in the face of all the balancing factors that are increasingly hard to hold back. These include both natural and social forces.

An article I read recently about the social, economic, and environmental impact of mountain biking referred to riders coming not only from the traditional high earning professions, but also from workers in occupations like construction and landscaping. Participation in an expensive activity lasts as long as you are willing to devote your funds to it. The fact that no one disses you for being a dirt worker as long as you can hold your own on the trail does not make the activity egalitarian. Anything with a buy-in of thousands of dollars up front, followed by ongoing consumption costs is not open to all. One section referred to a study that showed that 2/3 of mountain biking tourists in a particular area had annual incomes of $70,000 or greater. Another reference listed average household income as $100,000. You gotta bang a lot of nails and mow a lot of lawns to play in that league. You also can't afford it if you make your living fixing bikes. Not for long, anyway.

Bike boom flash mob

The pandemic has sparked a nationwide -- and possibly wider -- explosion of interest in biking. I should take time to research this thoroughly, but I've been too busy dealing with the influx of repair work.

The abrupt rogue wave of biking interest threatens to swamp the bike industry, which had been declining steadily for years, fed only by interest in limited sectors like smokeless mopeds. Smokeless mopeds reflect the general trend toward lower numbers of unit sales and higher individual unit costs. The demands that new technology places on shops hit small, independent shops particularly hard.

A recent article in Forbes Magazine drew parallels between the 1970s boom and the present one. We must be in a boom if mainstream business magazines think it's worth filling column inches with it. But the author, Carlton Reid, is actually a bike person masquerading as a general transportation writer.

Reid blamed the failure of the 1970s boom in part on "cheap imports." Cheap imports? Can you say WalMart? For that matter, scan the floor on any bike shop today and you will see almost nothing but imports, cheap and otherwise. Even the boutique American bike builders rely on imported components, even if the brand name on them is technically American. In the end, the article does correctly state that the 1970s boom fizzled out because Americans simply lost interest. It tracks nicely on the way we lost interest in ethics and an inclusive society a few years later.

The bike business used to be an outpost of freedom. The machines were simple enough that shops could sell and service a lot of them with fairly low overhead costs, and individual owners could easily master the care and repair of their machines, if they were so inclined. The 1970s bike boom relied heavily on the public's interest in reducing petroleum use, and the sense of freedom that bikes represented. The fact that the Baby Boom was bringing the biggest surge of youth and optimism in human history didn't hurt sales, either. A lot of people were feeling frisky. Small shops were easy to start and could expand as needed to serve local interest.

The arc of the mountain bike boom reflected a similar pattern, but with the fatal flaw of rapidly mutating technology. In the 1970s boom, buyers were advised to buy a bike with the best frame they could afford, on which they could hang nicer and nicer componentry as their budget allowed. There was even a progression of upgrades: do the wheels first, then the brakes, then the drive train. Change the saddle to one that suits you. Dial in the stem length and bar width. Maybe you'd prefer to do derailleur and crank upgrades before brakes, because "brakes are just for stopping." Owners were encouraged to think of their bikes as just a starting point for improvement and personalization. When the mountain bike boom took off with the advent of integrated shifting systems and experiments in suspension, the things an owner could change incrementally dropped rapidly to nearly nothing.

The 1970s bike boom coincided with a recession. So did the late 1980s to mid 1990s of the mountain bike boom. This could have contributed to public interest in recreational transportation that didn't require the expense of fuel, licensing, insurance, and vehicle registration. As the economy took off in the later 1990s, complexity and expense of the bikes was also rising. And then in about 2000 the public wandered away again.

Expensive gasoline in 2008 almost brought us back. We saw a huge increase in bike commuting for about a month and a half. Our floor stock had already shifted mostly to path bikes, some road bikes, and a handful of low end mountain bikes, reflecting the kinds of inquiries we were getting from our clientele. Anyone who had kept mountain biking after the boom busted wasn't even asking us anymore. We didn't see those customers until the last couple of years when they suddenly re-emerged, expecting us to have carried a torch for them during their long absence. And they hardly constituted boom numbers at best.

If you take a starving person and stuff them with food, they will probably die. If you take a hypothermic person and suddenly rewarm them they will probably die. If you take a moribund industry and suddenly slam it with consumer demand, it may not die, but it won't be able to sustain a boom. Add the fact that production and distribution were already disrupted by the coronavirus and the boom falls off a cliff as soon as stock on hand sells through.

On the repair side, we are inundated, and none of the repairs are cheap and quick. It's a classic example of how you can be working your ass off and still lose money. We don't outright lose money on each individual repair, but the time it takes to make it reduces the margin we can devote to overhead expenses and necessary re-supply. Many of these bikes look like they were buried in someone's back yard for several years and were dug up only because a quarantined person was rototilling for a garden and hit them. Or they were under an inch of greasy dust in the back of a garage. Or hung under a dripping plumbing pipe in the basement. Mixed with these are the beloved steeds of regular riders who want them back as quickly as possible.

In our first few days of contact commerce after weeks of locking people out I can confirm that customers are a great way not to get any work done. Yesterday was our first Saturday with the doors open. We sold almost all of our remaining assembled floor stock of bikes, which meant that no one was doing any actual wrenching a lot of the time. Customer interaction is made more cumbersome by the need to mask up, sanitize, and maintain distance, but without the precautions brought on by the disease we would have more people in the store, and added demands like rentals. And a few people have been fractious or irate about the precautions. That hasn't blown up into a full-fledged incident yet, but we're only talking about a few days so far.

The fact that we are busy gives some people the mistaken impression that we're making bank. Far from it. We haven't been able to fill stock on bikes, clothing, and other categories that help support the needs of the store. We haven't sold anything but the few bikes we managed to get from the incomplete fulfillment of our preseason orders. Repairs have required special ordering a lot of parts, which means we get pounded on shipping. You may get free freight on your consumer internet purchases, but businesses have to fork out. We are probably subsidizing all that free freight for the retailers who are destroying brick and mortar commerce.

Summer income will be diminished by the sensible restriction of travel and interaction. Then comes the usual doldrums of autumn, followed by a winter seriously in doubt. Our winter business relies entirely on human contact: ski sales, ski rentals, lessons, and ski services for people going to areas where people gather in crowds to use their skis. Winter tourism relies on lodging, dining out, and squeezing into buildings when not out in the cold air. As badly as we are hurt by fickle weather, if people can't even show up it won't matter how good the trail conditions are.

If the ski business is a complete bust, I would push heavily to get people to bring their bikes in for real in-depth service when we have time to dig into it and they don't have the urgent desire to get out on them. Complete overhauls are not cheap, but I can assure you that an annual "tune up" is not adequate to take care of the inner workings of most bikes. This would also be the time to get your suspension pivots rebuilt, and all the other time-sucking minutiae of modern bike ownership. It's all part of the cost of ownership. Would such an appeal work? I don't know if we'll even get to make it. And if we get a ski season, winter is the worst time to bring bikes to us.

For now, we just have to get through the current wave of demand.

Angels of Death at the grocery store

This morning I went to get a few grocery items that hadn't made the last list. As a considerate person, I wore a mask. I kind of like it behind the fabric. Once my glasses quit fogging up, it's cozy in there.

Mask use was widespread. This was the first time I'd seen the majority of people covering up. But there were the inevitable few naked faces, mostly adorned with contemptuous smirks. They still kept their distances, so I was content to swing wide and keep shopping. But then I turned down the snack aisle and saw a man and a woman who looked to be in their late 30s or early 40s, fake coughing and sneezing on a masked woman trying to get past them. "If God wants you he's gonna get you," they yelled after her.

I lost it.

"You don't have to be an asshole about it," I said. It degenerated from there. The male charged at me. He was pretty scrawny, but the enemy is not misguided rednecks, it's microbes. He was spewing a bunch of mostly disorganized threatening words, and kept telling me who he was and where he lived, probably to demonstrate that he was not afraid of me.  But he did stop and back up when I thrust a hand out and said, "Back. The fuck. Up." He continued to rant from three or four feet away while I snagged a couple of chocolate bars and retreated out the aisle. We exchanged loud ill wishes as we parted.

A couple of minutes later I ran into a store employee and told him about the situation. I was able to point out the couple to him. Whatever action was taken, I don't know, but a couple of minutes after that the scrawny guy came up six feet away from me, still unmasked, and proceeded to tell me that he was ready any time to have me over to his house for...what, I don't know. I was seriously ignoring him as long as he stayed six feet away.

I'm going to start carrying a boar spear when I have to go out. The crossbar keeps the charging beast from sliding up the shaft and getting too close.

Really, what an unpleasant thought. I gave up bloodthirstiness not long after I got out of my 20s. You don't have to think about it for very long to realize that it's not such a great idea. But our history is built on a pile of not so great ideas, ennobled and mythologized for centuries. The better ideas usually involve not having deadly confrontations, but the people who like deadly confrontations go ahead and start them, and then have to be answered in kind because we do not yet have the ability simply to immobilize them and set them aside while they consider the error of their ways. And you know that the power to immobilize would be abused early and often.

Reminders of the ignorance and malice of people make me want to stay either in the house or deep in the woods where there is no trail. That's not a great option with the ticks coming out heavily. It preys on my mind when I set out on the bike to go to work. I've only done a little so far, due to various schedule conflicts, but I was planning to make it a more regular thing. There's more room and air circulation than on a trail, even if it's exposed to traffic and the vagaries of public opinion.

Tight passing clearances present a challenge to my preferred commuting options. The full route only uses some of the Cotton Valley Trail on the route out of Wolfeboro at the end of the day, but park and ride options use a lot more. There are road alternatives, but they involve left turns at awkward intersections onto high speed roads. The actual speed limit isn't too high, but the herd average certainly is. And commuting time is when impatient motorists are most numerous. Having the right to use the road does not mean that you can assert it without exposure to other people's bad judgment.

If the idiot in the grocery store really gave me the location of his house, all the properties along there are listed to owners with Massachusetts addresses. That would mean that he's not even from around here. And his assertion about a god means that he is inflicting his values on passersby with typical arrogance. The righteous can do no wrong, right? He had quite the potty mouth for a man of god, though. Onward foulmouthed Christian soldiers.

I make no pretense of godliness. My profanity is utterly sincere. I only know that I support my fellow humans in our attempt to prevent the coronavirus from rampaging unopposed. Even the quarantine protesters put on their full tactical costumes and pick up their shootin' irons before going out to make their statement. They dress for the threat they want to face. They lack the true faith and commitment that civil rights protesters had in the 1960s, who went unarmed even though they knew that they would be beaten and teargassed, and dragged across the pavement when arrested. I don't think I could do that. The first thing I felt when that scrawny asshole in the grocery store came at me was the desire to obliterate him physically. What replaced it was a cool calculation, not a godly surge of peaceful acceptance. I don't want to give an unworthy opponent even temporary satisfaction. But that's when I do have to rise to the level of acceptance, that the things I have wanted for the world are uncommon and unlikely, and now their perpetuation is the task of another completely different generation of people. They are free to decide that they don't want them. Ultimately, all I can hope is that things don't get too shitty before I'm tired enough of living to stop doing it, or am forcibly removed.