Management likes to say that my expertise is valuable, but my hourly rate still falls far below our workshop hourly rate. Not complaining, just observing. My valuable expertise is another commodity marked up to bring in revenue to support the business as a whole.
From the mid 1990s through the first decade of the 21st century we could work on the principle "charge what you're worth and be worth what you charge." As the economy has shifted, and in many ways deteriorated, public perception of that worth has diminished while our cost of living has gone the same way as everyone else's.
Value is relative. Customers don't tend to equate their repair bill directly with my paycheck. They relate it to the perceived value they put on their bike.
I've been doing this long enough to remember when twenty dollars was considered a lot of money. In 1979, five dollars an hour was enough to secure space in a crappy apartment as long as you weren't also trying to own and maintain a crappy car. That also only worked if you had a full-time job at that rate. People think that scraping by on multiple part time gigs is something recent. For low level service workers, it's been around for a long time. And bike shop grunts fall solidly into the low level service worker category.
The bike business had its respected artisans during the steel era, and even edging into the aluminum age. Oh and don't forget titanium. Ah, metal, formed with fire and artistry. Professional cyclists actually raced on these primitive machines. We dodged the mammoths and giant sloths that lumbered across our paths in those days. How did we survive?
Anyway, if you've hung around bike shops for long enough, which is too long for any sane person with a scrap of ambition and a sense of self preservation, you get used to being low-balled and reamed out by your clientele, who think that anything that doesn't have a motor should be cheap to work on. It was cheap to buy! Or if it was expensive, that should be the end of it.
Way back in the 1960s, as a kid, I remember adults talking about a bill they got for some service or other, whether it was on a car or a home appliance, and how "most of it was labor!" This was usually uttered with a tinge of disbelief or resentment, as if it was a frivolous gouge lathered on top of the justifiable part of the bill. "Yeah, they really kill you on the labor."
Whether a price is fair or not depends on many variables. I've wondered for years how to figure out if the entire global economy is based on anything more solid than perceived value. In the time it would take to do a comprehensive audit, the situation would have changed so completely that the data would be useless. In the meantime, I narrowed the question to trying to figure out who was enslaved on my behalf. How is even my meager lifestyle subsidized by the wretched conditions of laborers near or far?
When someone brings in a bike to be repaired, I think a lot more about how I'm going to accomplish it than an immediate judgment of the cost. I was startled today to be reminded just how recently you could buy a really decent upper mid grade mountain bike for $800 or less. It was a couple of decades ago, but that seems recent to an old fart. The rocketing inflation in bike prices didn't really kick in until closer to 2010. By that time the local bike market had shifted from dozens of mountain bikes sold per year to maybe half that many road bikes in the same span, with a few cheap hardtails sold to kids and workers who for various reasons didn't drive. By the time technical mountain biking really reasserted itself, the numbers were still low and the prices climbed steadily, while the bikes themselves mutated fully from something still resembling a bike to the overtly motorcycle-based configurations now prevalent.
For technical mountain biking, the change was necessary. The original concept of the mountain bike as just a durable clunker was dead and buried. It had given birth to the hyper-technical beast of today, but couldn't occupy the same ecological zone.
When people bring in bikes from the Late Middle period of mountain bike evolution, they have the last of the easily repairable specimens. However, even in its best shape, such a bike is ill suited to the technical trails and riding style practiced today. Modern mountain bikes and modern trails have evolved together. So if a customer wants to spiff up an older bike for actual trail riding, they need to understand that it will be historical reenactment, like bombing down Tuckerman Ravine on 200cm telemark skis, with leather or early plastic boots, and basic cable bindings. If on the other hand the customer wants a durable exploring bike that's more technically capable than a road-configured gravel bike, they've got a winner with any properly fitted old mountain bike from the late 1980s to about 2008 or '09.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the cost of living and the cost of parts have both blown up so that the labor cost to have a commercial shop mechanic work on that bike will hit you with a bill that makes you question the value of it at all. Don't fall for the "I could just get a new one" fallacy, because enshittification has been progressing at least as rapidly as basic inflation. A bike for $700 in 2006 has components far better than the inflation-adjusted $1,300 bike of today. Astonishing? Yes. Depressing as hell, too. There is no direct equivalent in modern bikes.
Management is always on me to charge top dollar for the labor. Our price list used to be based on a la carte prices for individual services and some degree of discount when package deals like a tune-up or overhaul meant that some labor processes overlap. However, as times have gotten progressively tougher, management wants to see full whack getting charged for any parts installation added to the basic tune-up cost. The bills grow startlingly, leading customers to pay grudgingly, post nasty internet reviews, abandon the bike without paying, or, if they got the estimate beforehand, just deciding to scrap the project. Everyone loses in that case, because a bike that could have remained in service goes to the dump, and we get no income. Customers who say that they will pay us for the time we put into the estimate routinely don't come through on that and we never see them again. The ones who paid grudgingly also generally disappear forever, too.
The day is rapidly coming when storefront shops will not be able to offer comprehensive service because no one will pay enough to cover the overhead. The future of bike service lies in independent service-only facilities. Go buy your bike somewhere else.
My mentor Diane and her late husband ran a full machine shop out of their house in Orlando from the late 1970s. After his death in 1995, she continued. She's scaled back now in her late 60s, but probably still provides a wealth of knowledge and willing skill. Around this area I hear about places where people can get their older bikes worked on for free or close to it. Sometimes, the mechanics actually know what they're doing. As long as the wheels and handlebars stay tight, most riders don't care, and you can't beat the price. Free! I didn't secure a lavish enough retirement income to work for free.
A bike shop used to be a beacon for riders in distress; the place to find knowledgeable service and support. The cost of operating that lighthouse keeps rising. Retail commerce moves more and more online. The pay scale doesn't favor long-term staff retention. A shop that can attract a steady flow of new mechanics has more to teach them in less time before they age out and get serious about earning an actual living. The limiting factor is what the public is willing to pay. There's only so much money in the industry as a whole. Everyone in the business has to share from that limited pot.
E-bikes have siphoned off most of the recreational bike market. Riders who rely entirely on their own muscle are becoming rare. The e-bike industry has only some overlap with traditional bike companies, and that appears to be shrinking, as online sales of weird brands dominate both the pedal-assist and e-moto categories. E-bikes are more expensive than traditional pedal bikes to build and support. As consumer interest shifts away from the most bike-like configurations, old school bike manufacturers reduce offerings when they don't expect to sell through the inventory. Don't bother making what people aren't buying.
This was starting to show up at the end of the mountain bike boom. While excessive technology was a factor in killing the market, consumer ennui was also kicking in. Booms always end. Much of the time they leave behind a higher total number of participants compared to before the boom, but never as many as at the height. Biking without power assist may actually have shrunk by now.
Hard to say how it ends. Bikes are a widely distributed species of varmint, with enough variants to dodge complete extinction. Bike shops, on the other hand, might well be exterminated or nearly so.
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