The coming recession

 Back when the economy sagged around 1990, mountain biking surged, because it looked like cheap, accessible fun. A thousand bucks was still a lot for a bike, but sporty, capable machines costing $500 to $800 were an easy sell.

The recession in New Hampshire started a little sooner than 1990, because the 1980s had spawned a real estate boom that began to falter as the '80s ended. We went down a little sooner and stayed down a little longer than the official dates for the recession period. But the shop stayed busy because the many families that had been feeding off of the building boom couldn't just uproot and leave. Where would they go anyway, when the economy was spongy all over the country? So they stayed.

People from away still visited. People who might have taken a more expensive vacation to a more distant, bragworthy destination stayed closer to home.

Mountain biking thrived because it didn't require much investment after you bought a bike and a few accessories. You didn't need to buy fuel for it, register it, and insure it. Just buy a bike and go find the local trails.

Trails did exist. We rode for miles on logging roads and snow machine trails, and tried out hiking trails with varying success. During mountain biking's exploratory period, mountain bikers hadn't become as jaded and demanding as they are now. Consequently, there were a lot more of them.

By the mid 1990s, when the economy had revved up again, mountain biking was a habit. The bike industry was busily technologizing it to death, but it was a slow poison in pursuit of perfection. The mountain bike of today is truly an impressive product of evolution, well suited to the style and environment of its use. It's also never going to be cheap again, because you can't make a machine that will stand up to the demands of technical trails and fearless riders by keeping it simple. You want a simple bike? Stay away from mountain biking.

Because the bike industry grew obsessed with increasingly expensive technologies in all categories, their user base shrank, leading to much larger and more rapid inflation than in the rest of the economy. They had to farm fewer people for more money per person just to try to tread water.

You could take your old 1990s single speed on many trails. Routes we used to ride still exist. Just make sure you don't impede the rightful masters of those trails who paid a lot more for their bikes, especially if you are on one of the trails that they also paid a lot of money to have built.

Changes to mountain bike design do reflect lessons learned from the period of its greatest popularity. Front end geometry is designed around long travel suspension forks. A longer rigid fork would not provide the secure handling that a suspension fork provides, because it would not redirect the force of bumps and bashes the way suspension does. Front suspension allows you to put the front wheel out in front more, while the rider stays back behind the steering axis, which helps reduce the chances of going up and over the bars. Because the suspension telescopes, the wheel moves toward the bike as it moves upward. With a rigid fork, the wheel would stay out there, exerting its full leverage on the fork legs and lower headset bearing. Your simple bike would have to have the archaic geometry of the 1990s. Your riding style would have to reflect that.

The combination of tariffs and economic instability looming before us for this summer spell big trouble for the bike industry. Even the sales of cheap e-bikes will suffer, because they are entirely built in tariff-affected countries. Even with that, cheap e-bikes will stay viable because more and more low-level workers will not be able to afford even a beater car. Hard to say how it shakes out nationwide, when so many urban areas have been designed around the armored cavalry model of transportation.

The way the economy is being collapsed, it won't all fall in at once. This will help the administration, because the people who go down first have the least political leverage. They (we) are quite numerous, but easily divided over trivial matters. But the bike market has been fragmented for almost 20 years now. People in general seem to have less to spend on recreation, and far more options to spend it on than they had in the 1990s.

In hard times, people do pay to repair their older items, but they still have limited funds, and repair parts are subject to the tariffs and inflation.