I don’t really have a point but just to state that i’m pretty conflicted on this topic. I love the the cafe i go to, the lbs and the record store here in Taichung, all run by people that are very passionate about their store and the products they are selling. People i really enjoy supporting, but on the same note ,if the internet is pushing everything forward and streamlining things, wouldn’t it make sense to embrace it rather than stop it?
I buy both from local indie record shops but mainly from amazing online stores like forced exposure and boom kat that no physical music store can fuck with as far as having things in stock all the time.
Its definately a catch 22 issue. Supporting your LBS or local music shop or cafe certainly supports your local economy, while buying online and cutting out the middleman supports someone other than locals. Personally I dont want to pay more for anything than I absolutely have to. I was pissed to see that the bike I spent all day looking for and finally purchased was available online from Bens for $100 less and free shipping.
Leaving aside the whole supporting local business issue (a fan, personally), I am sure QBP deals with people wanting to form a discount buying club with their internet pals at least once a week. This just isn’t going to happen.
the evidence says this is QFT.
[quote=nullassult]so you have to s your b’s d?
unless your b is a g and then you could B your L on her Ts.[/quote]
Well done.
This is just the sort of thing that makes me hate people who don’t give a shit about their local scene and will screw them over just to get parts for cheap. I mean, I dislike capitalism as much as the next person, but this is just fucking lame. Anyway, someone already came up with a better way to make sure local shops lose business. It’s called Performance. And you don’t even have to be a member.[/quote]
Don’t judge me so fast! Don’t assume I don’t give a shit about my or any local scene or my LBS. That would be dead wrong. For the record I buy most of my parts local at and have well established relationships with 4 of the 8 or so LBS. I have also been involved with or part of more than one local organic food coop and or CSAs . I would guess that most would not have any issue with them. I don’t see how buying direct from a manufacture is much different from a CSA. Except that the LBS is also a small business that is worthy of and dependent on local customers. A tarkbike coop could even also work with a LBS. It is highly conceivable that a LBS would rather sell 30 sets of cranks at a 15% mark up than 3 sets at 40% markup. I also see Tarkbike as a community and therefore worthy of supporting. Forming a coop to save a little $$$ on parts or a frame (that one might not be able to afford otherwise), not only helps our community, but will also likely result in additional ripple effect sales at the local shop. The reality is we as a community already are suporing many web-based stores who are hurting LBS, and at least if we formed a coop we would be supporting supporting our community. And if we wanted to as a community could have a membership fee or a small mark up on purchases with profits to be donated to the larger cycling, for example the bicycle messenger emergency found.
Co-opping, groupbuys, and other internet shenanaigans devalues the whole industry. As a local bike shop owner who works his ass off to support the local cycling scene in any way that I can I find all of this kind of thing to be utter bullshit. Fuck Ben’s and every other person out there trying to get rich by taking customers from markets outside their own. If your town REALLY lacks a decent shop than I truly feel for you… but still fuck Ben’s, fuck bikes direct, and fuck and the rest of the business like these. Support the shops that give back to their local community or eat the dicks.
OK so I had no intention of starting a controversy. Again I do very much support my LBS. and agree that this keeping it local is important in most purchase I make. I would in many cases rather spend a small fraction more and keep my local hardware, bike shop, coffee shop ETC then see them go under and my only option become a home depot, Performance, or a starfucks!
But I do think brick and mortar Coops have value to their communities. But that may well be an entirely different subject.
If this goes through, I’m ordering 3 or 4 pounds of cable ends and knog frogs in every color.
[quote=tzusing]I don’t really have a point but just to state that i’m pretty conflicted on this topic. I love the the cafe i go to, the lbs and the record store here in Taichung, all run by people that are very passionate about their store and the products they are selling. People i really enjoy supporting, but on the same note ,if the internet is pushing everything forward and streamlining things, wouldn’t it make sense to embrace it rather than stop it?
I buy both from local indie record shops but mainly from amazing online stores like forced exposure and boom kat that no physical music store can fuck with as far as having things in stock all the time.[/quote]
omg thank you, I had never heard of forced exposure
Im curious as to what hobbies outside of cycling everyone participating within this thread is into. As much as I would love to support my local scene, I can ignore the simple fact that stuff is cheaper on the internet vs. in store.
If you’ve ever remodeled a home you’ll appreciate using ebay and other sites to purchase goods vs. home depot/lowes or even a mom and pop shop, as shit gets expensive real quick.
With cars its the same thing. Shops that once made most of their money from selling parts, were being hurt by internet businesses with no overhead, and the smart shop owners have changed gears and now make all their income from service and repair work.
Why cant bike shops specialize in service and repair vs. parts sales?
Ultimately if you spend less on parts be it bike car or whatever, you’ll have more money to spend elsewhere, like say being able to buy organic foods and supporting local farmers. Ultimately who would you rather see stay in business a bike shop making 30-40% on parts, or dude growing tomatoes.
Have fun cursing the tide. Bike co-ops are great and the folks at Ben’s have always done right by me. If people appreciate what you provide they should support your shop, but there is no obligation there.
If you want to take advantage of all that capitalism offers you, don’t whine about having to pay retail. Working around the LBS cuts out probably the only local, non-corporate entity in the entire transaction. If you want to save money, then don’t buy some much shit. If all you’re buying is tubes and tires, that shit really isn’t that expensive in the first place. Who cares if the $6 you pay at the lbs for a tube is a 100% mark-up from wholesale. The distributer probably puts a 100% markup on it from the price they pay the factory. And anyway, paying $6 every few months (weeks if you’re unlucky) isn’t a bad deal to have a machine that can carry you all over town. And if all you want is to be able to get purple veeps or ouries for cost, then I’m not going to even bother arguing with you.
As for supporting the Tarck community, we ain’t going nowhere. Us getting parts for cheap is not going to make us stronger.
If you can’t afford the minimal cost of keeping up a non-tricked out bike, then maybe you should rethink your iphone contract.
Balonya, this isn’t aimed only (or even primarily) at you. There is a good bit of this “I’m too cool to have to pay retail” sentiment going around. A lot of people don’t get it that the system you support functions entirely on people making money. If you still want the massive selection of goods that we have, then you gotta keep lining other people’s pockets. And the more money you give them, the more selection they’ll give you.
Because unless you are in a low-rent little hole in the wall service rarely pays the bills. Our service department is SUPER efficient and well organized but not profitable because it is staffed mainly by full time, salaried, master mechanics that we give health care to. If you take the parts profit out of the average transaction most repair jobs are break even or small losses. “tune ups” are a great example of this. Going through from start to finish checking and adjusting everything on a bike can be quite time consuming and progressively more so depending on how the bike has been maintained in the past. If I am paying my mechanic $13 an hour plus health care plus rent plus electricity plus tools plus all the other overhead unless that tuneup takes well under an hour it absorbs enough resources to be a loss.
When legit bike shops that have the size/buying power to stock enough inventory to have that part you need for your bike TODAY (34.9 front derailleur clamp? 30.9 seatpost? whatever?) it changes the rules of doing business. My shop is not performance. We challenge them on availability of parts but we charge retail. If we did not we could not afford to pay a staff that actually has a fucking clue.
Two or three years ago I used to stock and sell Sugino 75s, Nitto bars, lots of mks, and other nicer track specific stuff… now Ben’s has devalued that stuff so much that I can’t justify it taking up space on my floor when a set of Origin8 cranks are actually more profitable. That makes no sense.
Pressuring LBSs to close up or get smaller seems like no big deal until you need a park BBT–22 TODAY to fix your bike yourself. Ebay can’t cut the seized bottom bracket out of your conversion either.
NO ^ offense taken ^ Tim Archery
In fact I would agree with most of the above. However, despite obviously living in a capitalist society, I do not consider myself a capitalist. Though I also own and gladly pay for the PRIVILEGE of using an iphone. I completely agree that we as a society(at least those of us living in the US) need to buy less shit. I also believe that in many cases buying quality saves you money in the long run, saves natural resources, and creates less waste. I don’t mean $200 designer jeans over a $60 pair of jeans, I mean buying a Quality tire (pick your brand) over a Wal-mart tire or, energy efficient light bulbs instead of the old kind. My comment about forming a coop was aimed at this line of thought, it was not intended as just a way to get cheap shit to trick my bike out with. In any case there are lots of trade offs regardless of where you shop.
i’m a web designer, local shops take money out of my pockets 
the facts are that the internet and internet businesses are not going anywhere. I order parts through my lbs alot of the times but when i’m looking for something very specific I go to the internet. While it sounds ideal that you would never have to leave your community for anything, in this day and age it just isn’t going to happen.
I’m am part owner of a web design company and our many goal is to help smaller businesses by giving them the tools they need to compete with the large companies but at a much lower cost. Bike shops will always be needed just like car shops will always be needed, how they operate will have to adapt to survive though.
I helped start a local car club, that is now state wide. We get discounts from a small local parts shop, at the dealership, and at an online shop. Because of this these businesses get our money almost exclusively which is a benefit to them despite selling us parts cheaper.
I am also a photographer and I get my prints done online. We have a local shop that could print but the price would push my rates way to high. I so buy things there but the fact is we are just starting out and have $0 start up money so we find deals where we can to get the ball rolling.
this
I know this is your livelihood and it’s something that you’re emotional about. However, this smacks of protectionism, which is not really sustainable by any means. In a free market, those that survive are the ones that offer the most value to the consumer. Success is contingent upon that and protectionism will only delay the inevitable. I don’t have any experience running an LBS, so I can’t speak with certainty, but from my perspective, there are a lot of areas where an LBS can offer greater value than an Internet shop or a direct-from-distributor sort of deal.
We can argue about whether or not this is true, but it looks like you’ve already figured out a way to operate your shop profitably, by stocking the parts that you can and getting customers into your shop spending money that could otherwise be spent on the Internet. As long as you’re willing to optimize your business model to stay profitable, it sounds like you’ll be successful for the long term. Those that are unwilling to change are those that are likely not to survive.
Not protectionism at all. Just common sense. If the shops that are staffed with more experienced / more costly employees are forced to abandon this approach in favor of part time monkeys like Performance and the like everyone suffers. I see people over on the weightweenies board who are from the UK complain about this all the time. Most of the shops over there are mass-market mail order driven shops staffed by low wage employees who know very little about what they are selling. When you want to get something complex done you are often times s.o.l. Unfortunately like I said before a service department is not even close to cost effective without parts sales.
You are right… we are doing well but many of good shops are hurting bad because of this change. What is disturbing to me is the potential long term effects. The younger the customer is the more internet savvy they tend to be. As these customers mature they will replace the old guard that are more used to the idea of heading over to the LBS to get a chain. I think we will see a steady decline in truly quality local shops. In the end the customer looses out too when they loose options.
A free market only works up to a point. In the world of Lowes/Home Depot it is EXTREMELY difficult to get certain products in a timely fashion. Sure the prices are lower than the traditional “hardware” store but with larger chain stores comes less diversity in products and less experience within the staff.
I suggested that it “smacked” of protectionism, which is not quite the same as saying that it is protectionism. I realize that you’re just encouraging people to support their LBS which is good for you and businesses like yours. Your points are well made and I mostly agree. I would likely encourage people to invest some thought into how they spend their money and find value where they can. The free market is what it is and it often sucks for the consumer and businessperson alike, but situations like you describe also create potential for success in the marketplace. If enough unsuccessful bike shops go out of business from loss of margin on parts sales, that will leave an excess of service business for those bike shops that are left. Service prices and margins should go up as a result.
Perhaps I should spend some time studying microeconomics. I could certainly be more well-informed on this topic.