The State of LBS and the All Month Long Black Friday Sale

If you’re like me, you can hardly believe that we are in the 11th month of the year and 2023 will be wrapping up in just under 60 days. It’s the time of year when folks start to huddle inside, put the bike on the trainer, and wait for the winter solstice to come as we savor every sliver of sunlight during the waning nights of winter. It’s also the time of year when we buy gifts for loved ones (and if we’re being honest, ourselves.) Our televisions, app feeds, and everything else become inundated with advertisements to lure us into spending our hard earned money at a specific place or on a specific product. So at this point in time, we want to take a moment to tell you how appreciative we are of the dollars and cents that you choose to spend with us and we’re pretty sure that other small, locally owned businesses feel the same.

First of all, let’s talk about the thing we all have in common and love the most: bicycles (and more importantly, the community that surrounds bicycling) and the challenges that the the post-pandemic years have brought to the local bike shops specifically. It goes without saying that the bike boom of the pandemic years was something the market had never seen before (and will never see again). It brought folks into bike shops the world over, so much so, that bike manufacturers ran out of products and with factory shutdowns across the globe, they also ran out of the ability to restock the shelves. It was a pendulum swing that overtook the market and like all pendulum swings…and as is human nature (especially in large corporate environments)…the solution was to go all-in and ramp up production to meet the demand of this new found windfall for our favorite hobby. At the shop level, this meant finding any and every way possible to supply bikes to the sales floors. It got really crazy and cut throat during those years. It took a lot of discipline for shops like ours to stay the course and maintain our conservative approach to supplying our sales floor with bike models that we have always stocked: bikes that check a lot of boxes i.e. great for road biking, gravel biking, bike packing, commuting, and a good mix of being comfortable and fast. Staying the course meant we’d lose out on some bikes we wanted and be pushed further back in line for the ones we wanted to get, but we also felt that the super-bike-demand-bubble would burst and we needed to be ready to mitigate the pain it would cause for our business as much as we possibly could.

In the Spring of 2023, the bubble burst. Local bike shops everywhere saw companies with direct to consumer pricing structures drop their pricing precipitously for bikes that had been on sales floors across the nation….bikes that had been bought on terms months in advance. What this means for those outside the industry is that the margins on bicycles got even more slim than they already are. Bike shops already don’t work the cost of shipping or assembly into the price of the bike on the sales floor. Those are real costs for a lot of shops, but they aren’t part of the price equation…they’re just a cost of goods sold. But with the oversupply of bikes on the manufacturers side and their desire to offload inventory, the squeeze began on bike shops everywhere…globally. Small manufacturers of bikes and bike products began to shutter and close up shop. Big multi-million dollar suppliers began huge layoffs and some filed for bankruptcy. So the perfect storm of over-correcting on the supply side for the bike boom and the global inflation problem post pandemic came home to roost and bike shops are navigating it the best way they can. The brands we work with have been pretty good about messaging with us early on concerning the oncoming drop in prices and have done what they can to help ease the huge erasure of margin gains that got axed through their firesale strategies to empty their warehouses. This isn’t a soap box talking about the evils of capitalism. Greed is a terrible drug and few find the cure, and companies certainly aren’t looking for it. Our point is, everyone is hurting. Mistakes were made. Those with the deepest pockets will weather the storm. The biggest players in the game will lose profit margin but stay viable. The biggest losers in the game will have to close up shop and bid work they love adieu. We hope the situation starts to level out sooner than later so that the bicycle landscape and community we love so much about doesn’t look too differently than it did before the pandemic, but time will only tell. Which brings me to the point of the article about the month long Black Friday Sale we’re having.

All of our in stock bikes are on sale with a lot of them up to 30% off which is literally hundreds of dollars off of some amazing bikes. From a cost of entry perspective, there hasn’t been a better time to get a new bike than now. The pendulum has swung to the buyers favor. As a local bike shop, we’ve been an advocate for the customer even during the highest levels of the inflation level pricing that got way out of hand. We never priced our bikes at the highest level of pricing that the bikes reached in the peak pricing days. We just couldn’t do it. We watched the inflation index. We saw the increase in shipping. We saw what we purchased our bikes at and did the math. So we decided to always stay within the actual margin of what the actual inflation numbers were during the days of 8-9% inflation (during those days, many bikes were being priced at almost 3-5% more than the actual inflation numbers). This was our way of doing what we could to help offset the financial burden. With the oversupply of bikes, we’re excited to move our selection of bikes at some great value pricing. You’re going to see tons of ads from big box retailers and online retailers offering the same discounts (maybe little more) as we move through this season. What we’re trying to do is marry the value of pricing with the value of the local bike shop and locally owned business. Can we slash prices like a direct to consumer business model? No. Sadly, your local bike shop isn’t the manufacturer so there is not a lot of margin to be cut out before it becomes a race to closing the doors. But what we can do and your other local bike shops can do is get pretty darn close while still paying their mechanics, light bills, rent, and utilities. So when you get the opportunity to upgrade your bike or gear this month, be sure to stop in here or another local bike shop and support the community of locally owned businesses that add some pizazz and flair to the scene with their knowledgeable and grumpy mechanics and their passionate ultra light weight weenies who can build their bike to be sub-15 lbs and the folks who can bikepack to St. Louis with 65 lbs of gear or ride fixed gear bikes on their gravel races. Seriously, it’s a pretty amazing community of people out there with bikes being the common denominator and the locally owned bike shops are a hub for bringing the community of bike people together. Community is needed now more than ever. Thanks for coming to our Ted Talk.