The theme for August was "dereliction of duty." Scheduling needs in my personal life led me to take a week off during the height of August business, and then to take Labor Day Weekend off as well. My mother should have planned her birth better, back in 1929. The situation to which I returned reminded me that people who work in service businesses should have no life outside of work. We should be available at all times to meet the needs of customers.
Customer need can be unpredictable, even if you know what to expect from general seasonal trends. To serve the public the best, have no other demands on your time. The ideal service provider is skilled, intelligent, good natured, adaptable, and a solitary orphan with no outside interests. When a work load suddenly goes from nearly nothing to overload, settle in for late nights and early mornings until the customers are taken care of. People with the budget and leisure time to ride for pleasure have obviously made better life choices, and deserve your immediate and complete obeisance. Worker bees like yourself, who use their bikes for transportation deserve your comradely support. If the work load is light, enjoy the respite, but don't get accustomed to free time. When business vanishes as it always does, you'll need whatever you have managed to save up to keep yourself alive until demand rises again.
I was never good at this. My job was always a way to finance my life. Years ago, the low-level day jobs seemed like a normal part of a writer's life -- and they are. But there are millions of us who never got any further than the life of a grunt with big dreams. They aren't even huge dreams, just comfortable middle class dreams. But the means of obtaining them was more important than the things themselves. With an influx of wealth, I would still live as I do, traveling a bit more, and contributing financially to important and under-funded needs of the ecosystem and society more than I am able to do in my paycheck-to-paycheck existence. I really like just sitting in my clearing in the woods, watching nature be nature. When I do get to go somewhere else, it's mostly to watch nature there. If I had a fortune, I would spend a good bit of it to buy land and leave it alone.
The pile of repair work at the start of September was a little surprising. It shouldn't be. We usually see a flurry of people who waited until they thought the summer rush was over, and then jammed up in the doorway as they all brought their stuff in at once. Add to that some post-season vacationers and one or two local riders in a jam, and you get a daunting tangle of urgent crap requiring skilled labor, stat. On my first day back at work after my last dereliction, I thought that I should probably just sleep at the shop for a few nights, so I could work until I dropped and resume when I crawled back to consciousness. I have plenty of trouble crawling back to consciousness at the best of times. Much as I know I should be fanatically devoted to work, my pace is a dogged plod. When closing time comes, I'm headed for the door, no matter how I might have imagined myself a few hours earlier.
Between my efforts -- less drastic than taking up temporary residency -- and the arrival of reinforcements with the Saturday crew, we managed to push through the bulge and leave the docket manageably light before I took my precious days off. The things I did in August were enjoyable, but not entirely relaxing, and they took me away from routine chores around the homestead as winter clicks inexorably closer.
The dregs of summer are at the same time precious and not worth anything. In this hilly and tree-covered part of New England, a single cloud shadow can change the character of the day. The effect is magnified when viewed through the frame of a window. The sun already has little enthusiasm except at the height of afternoon. Clouds conspire to help it slink away. Morning fog conceals its rise. It seems like hardly any time has passed since we were waiting under May and early June's broadening expanse of daylight for some warmth to go along with it.
Showing posts with label end of summer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label end of summer. Show all posts
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Bike shops are never "raking it in."
El Queso Grande had to solo one day while I was away. A repair and rental load that would have seemed ominously scanty when we had a full staff is more than enough to paralyze the shop with only one or two mechanics available, and only one of them very experienced. With El Queso Grande juggling all the chainsaws by himself, it looked to the untrained eye like a man barely finding time to open the cash register to stash away the shower of doubloons that must be coming from all these customers lined up at every door and counter.
Someone even said, "You must really be raking it in."
Bike shops are never raking it in. One nice young man with money to burn did buy an eleven thousand dollar road bike from us this summer, but that was one guy, one bike, one time. The average bike sells for maybe $400, with a clear profit of less than $100, after you extract overhead expenses. Probably closer to $10. Bigger shops are just making more of those average sales, with correspondingly higher overhead expenses. They might also sell more of the higher end bikes, but probably not a lot of the $11,000 variety. And more expensive bikes require lots more diligence, skill, and experience to assemble correctly and tune precisely enough to satisfy a customer who has dropped anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 for what is now a mid-range or barely high-end bike. It still seems like a lot of money to most of us, even if the steady march of generational inflation has made it worth less.
Because of our short staff, we have had to turn work away. This is the first time since I started there 30 years ago that I have seen the management say we just couldn't do something. We've always tried to cram it in. Granted, it's partly because they've realized -- belatedly -- that life itself is more valuable than money, and that they have to get out of the shop to enjoy that life, but it's also because business itself is now so scanty that we couldn't afford staff even if we could find any. We have to make do with our own selves, and the couple of welcome fill-in people who will work specific days. And one of them just got a real job, coaching cross-country running and cross-country skiing at Clarkson University. His last day was Sunday.
When the rush of business ends, it dumps us into a weird solitude. The town still looks pretty much the same. The late summer sun spreads its golden light over the waters that are still warm, the green trees abuzz with cicadas. But no one jockeys for parking. No crawling, baking parade of motor vehicles inches through Main Street. No throng of pedestrians spreads out in all directions from the center of town. No money comes into the cash register. Because summer has shrunk to Fourth of July weekend and the first three weeks of August, that's it for major earning potential. Foliage tourism has dwindled significantly since the 1990s. Winter tourism for us depends on good natural conditions, which have become even more unreliable than New England's schizophrenic weather already was.
The changing climate and polluted world have led to such things as algae blooms that will kill your dog if it swims in an infected lake or pond, and a surge in tick-borne illnesses. El Queso Grande got anaplasmosis this summer, on top of his other challenges. In our country's asinine treasure hunt of a medical system, that entailed driving to labs "in his network" that he can also afford. That really cuts into the "raking it in." And that was after his carpal tunnel and cubital tunnel surgery: more overhead expenses related to remaining alive.
Someone even said, "You must really be raking it in."
Bike shops are never raking it in. One nice young man with money to burn did buy an eleven thousand dollar road bike from us this summer, but that was one guy, one bike, one time. The average bike sells for maybe $400, with a clear profit of less than $100, after you extract overhead expenses. Probably closer to $10. Bigger shops are just making more of those average sales, with correspondingly higher overhead expenses. They might also sell more of the higher end bikes, but probably not a lot of the $11,000 variety. And more expensive bikes require lots more diligence, skill, and experience to assemble correctly and tune precisely enough to satisfy a customer who has dropped anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 for what is now a mid-range or barely high-end bike. It still seems like a lot of money to most of us, even if the steady march of generational inflation has made it worth less.
Because of our short staff, we have had to turn work away. This is the first time since I started there 30 years ago that I have seen the management say we just couldn't do something. We've always tried to cram it in. Granted, it's partly because they've realized -- belatedly -- that life itself is more valuable than money, and that they have to get out of the shop to enjoy that life, but it's also because business itself is now so scanty that we couldn't afford staff even if we could find any. We have to make do with our own selves, and the couple of welcome fill-in people who will work specific days. And one of them just got a real job, coaching cross-country running and cross-country skiing at Clarkson University. His last day was Sunday.
When the rush of business ends, it dumps us into a weird solitude. The town still looks pretty much the same. The late summer sun spreads its golden light over the waters that are still warm, the green trees abuzz with cicadas. But no one jockeys for parking. No crawling, baking parade of motor vehicles inches through Main Street. No throng of pedestrians spreads out in all directions from the center of town. No money comes into the cash register. Because summer has shrunk to Fourth of July weekend and the first three weeks of August, that's it for major earning potential. Foliage tourism has dwindled significantly since the 1990s. Winter tourism for us depends on good natural conditions, which have become even more unreliable than New England's schizophrenic weather already was.
The changing climate and polluted world have led to such things as algae blooms that will kill your dog if it swims in an infected lake or pond, and a surge in tick-borne illnesses. El Queso Grande got anaplasmosis this summer, on top of his other challenges. In our country's asinine treasure hunt of a medical system, that entailed driving to labs "in his network" that he can also afford. That really cuts into the "raking it in." And that was after his carpal tunnel and cubital tunnel surgery: more overhead expenses related to remaining alive.
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