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.