5 Days ≠ 5 days

Ski season demands a different kind of energy than bike season. In some ways it's lower. If we have good snow, leading to active rentals and retail sales, we have to deal with a lot of immediate customer needs, but almost nothing spills over into complicated services. Dealing with the public can be tiring and annoying, but it's basically a revolving door kind of transaction. They trample in, we hand them gear, they trample out. In the afternoon, renters return to drop their wet gear and leave again.

I work some long days in rental season, arriving early to set up the shop after wet boots have laid out overnight to dry. My personal life goes on hold for as long as the peak period lasts. That depends on the weather. It could be a couple of months or a few days. It only demands patience and infection control. The five-day week is tiring. I'm always glad to get to the shorter hours of spring.

Here's the thing: bike work, especially service work, is way more exhausting than ski work. Winter is exhausting in its way because I have to take care of my house, clear my driveway, shovel my roof if the winter calls for it, and still get to work on schedule. It taxes my body. But bike work absolutely drains my brain, and has an emotional component as well as I try to handle all of the variables.

Bike comes in for service. What kind of bike is it? How old is it? Expensive or cheap, was it well made? Plenty of expensive stuff out there in the last 20 years is poorly thought out. Some of it, particularly from fringe e-bike companies, is shamefully crappy. But even the "good stuff" from what are perceived as reputable companies suffers from technophilia. So when I assess it I have to determine if it was ever fixable, let alone whether it is still supported.

As the 20th Century neared its end, bike companies started getting more and more coy about publishing tech information and specs. For a while we could keep an archive of printed catalogs to have some idea. Back when we went to trade shows, we could pick up materials from the brands that we didn't sell as well as the latest from our own vendors. That not only helped us when chiseling customers quoted competitors' prices to us. It also helped us repair those bikes. And the bikes themselves were simpler, which helped everyone, especially riders, whether they realized it or not.

I advocated for simplicity as I saw the trend in the industry toward complicated, expensive mechanisms. No one listened to me. Customers voted with their wallets in two ways: A bunch of them abandoned biking altogether. The remainder were technolemmings eager to run off of whatever cliff the industry put a shiny new gizmo on the edge of.

The next steps after figuring out if a repair is possible at all are to determine if we have parts on hand or can get them. At the same time I have to calculate the cost and see if the customer is willing to pay it. People will sink astonishing amounts of money into a piece of cheap junk, while others will walk away from something in the mid or upper price range that could be fixed for significantly less than the price of a new one. It's just that new ones are so expensive that "significantly less than the price of a new one" is still several hundred dollars. We have repairable full suspension bikes abandoned in our basement because the owner ghosted us. More than once this happened after they said, "I do want to pay you for your time." No you didn't. Don't even bother to lie.

You might think that we can then spiff up those bikes and sell them for enough to recover our sunk costs, but with all of the other things that we have to do with a rapidly aging skeleton crew, like vet our decrepit rental bike fleet and keep up with the billable work for customers who do want to pay us for our time, rehabbing a mountain bike rapidly going out of fashion never seems to get done.

As a repair moves through the process, setbacks might occur that lead to additional charges. Then I have to feel out the customer without scaring them off and figure out how much, if any, of the extra cost we can recoup to avoid losing our entire investment of time and material in the repair so far. Most people don't need their bikes. It's all discretionary spending.

The ones who do need their bikes don't usually have a lot of slack in their budgets, no matter how willing they might be in theory to pay us what we're worth. We've had two bikes hanging downstairs for at least four months while the owners try to scrape up the money to have a flat tire repaired. We know from experience that if we fix the bikes and let them go without payment, the owners won't get back to us with the money. Heck, we've got a guy who actually worked part time for us to score employee discounts who is into us for a couple thousand for an e-mountain bike and trailer. Times are tough. A lot of our inadvertent charitable donations are not tax deductible.

The work no longer inspires hope or is particularly satisfying. Some customers appreciate it. Others take it for granted. The cool kids are all way cooler than I am, so I'm barely a step above someone pushing a broom to them. Maybe not even. So at the end of the day, and emphatically at the end of a week, I'm fckin' done. I want as much of the season of light and warmth as I can get. All too soon we go spinning into the darkness again, to grapple with whatever passes for a winter.

E-bikes are the new Muffy

 Two e-bikes were parked by the entrance to the grocery store yesterday at 7:00 p.m. They were black, heavily built, with brand names that had no connection to the traditional bike industry. I usually see them on the road. Their riders wear regular -- non cycling -- clothing, and ride all year.

Lower income people who for various reasons did not use cars would traditionally buy cheap bikes. These were often in the Muffy category. Muffy was bike shop shorthand to describe bikes in the category with Huffy and Murray, two major brands in the degenerated US bike industry. The category also included Columbia, Kent, and any other department store brands. As department stores faded in prominence with the rise of Walmart, the new category of Walgoose emerged. Walgoose refers to the disgraced Mongoose brand, which left the bike shop channel and moved into the big box channel when Brunswick Outdoor Recreation bought them in the 1990s.

When smokeless mopeds first hit the scene, we only saw them in our shop as playthings of the super wealthy. The earliest proponent of them in our orbit would dispute the title of super wealthy, having modestly settled for only a few hundred million dollars. The others are also small fry, barely in the billionaire category at all. We're not talking Musk and Bezos money here, but certainly quite comfortable. The electric bikes were toys. However, e-bikes eventually reached the takeoff point. The craze has attracted more companies than the mountain bike boom ever did. Prices are tumbling, with quality to match. They still cost way more than a Walgoose, but they provide excellent value to a worker who never aspired to be a cyclist. Well, a motorcyclist, maybe.

A smokeless moped is a fantastic transportation tool for someone whose job is already tiring enough, who gets paid as little as society can get away with to do things society definitely wants done. The ones with a throttle option eliminate pedaling entirely. They're low-powered electric motorcycles, neatly protected from the need for licensing, registration, and insurance by the mere presence of a bicycle crankset and a pair of pedals.

Smokeless mopeds aren't cheap compared to a Walgoose, a Muffy, a Toadmaster, or the current incarnation of Schwein. But they offer a much better ride.

Product support for e-bikes can be bad. Because lots of little companies are slapping these things together from the same limited array of parts suppliers, you will find a lot of cheap, no-name parts. I haven't done more than skimming research into the e-bike community online, but I have picked up snippets from forum threads where enthusiasts talk about substitutions, repairs, and upgrades that a knowledgeable person can do. For anyone who doesn't know how all that stuff works, or have a friend who does, electrical problems in particular can be discouraging. But even if you get just three years out of an $800 moped, you made out better than you would with an $800 car, and took it a lot easier than you would with a cheap non-motorized bike.

The e-bikes I see regularly used for practical journeys around here all have onboard lighting systems. They are configured for transportation. Hunting and fishing stores sell versions configured for those activities. You pay more than $1,000 for a solid transportation vehicle, but it has a lot of what you need to have your best chance of survival in the mosh pit that is the American highway system.

Established bike companies offer electrified versions of sport bikes in road and mountain categories. These adaptive aids for the enfeebled are not transportation bikes, although someone might try to graft attachments to them to make them do some actual work. The same companies have their leisure bike versions with varying degrees of adaptability to daily practicality. The more an e-bike tries to look and act like an analog bike, the less useful it is in the broader moped category.

Gas engine mopeds didn't pretend to be bicycles. They knew their place in the hierarchy of motorcycles. In the 1970s, rising gas prices and periodic fuel shortages led to their surge in popularity. They were equipped like motorcycles. Their engine noise and the blue cloud of oil smoke that often surrounded them identified them readily as something that didn't belong on what passed for bike paths at the time. But it was a free-for-all on the streets. Pedalers, drivers, mopedists, all jostled along on the same network.

Classic gas-powered mopeds mostly died out. But the electric version could be around a while. Aside from battery fires, they make better house pets than gas-engine mopeds do. No drippy fuel or engine oil. Quiet running. The only leakage you might have to worry about is brake fluid. They have limitations in cold and wet weather that an internal combustion machine does not, but they still have many advantages for someone who needs cheap transportation.