The LBS that I like is closed on Sundays, so I went to the next closest shop for a PC830 chain. Skinny Gen X dude charged me $30 + tax without telling me the cost, then got pissed off when I immediately returned it. Like, threw the product on the floor pissed. I gave a frowny face feedback on the Square receipt and immediately got a big text message about how hard it is to run a bike shop, how everything is different since the pandemic, etc.
Sucks to suck. Went to a bike cafe on the river and got the same chain for $12, and the guy apologized for marking it up $3 over MSRP. Is it really so hard in the mines nowadays? 200% markup on a product you almost always buy in bulk is insane to me.
$30 is a little extreme, but I don’t know what their overhead is like either tho.
If they charged MSRP the gross margin is 30%. You can’t run a shop with margins like that and pay anything that even remotely resembles a living wage. Especially if you are tying up dollars in inventory so someone can get a chain on a Sunday.
AFAIK the partner-owners don’t have other employees. Maybe their rent sucks. Maybe they’re buying single chains and tubes and shit without bulk discounts. Maybe they should migrate into e-commerce only - still not allowing anyone into the store. Maybe they haven’t because their website is broken.
Whole lot of variables in running a business I guess!
I have a new contract for a public safety fleet. I’m getting the fleet up to par to start a preventative maintenance routine and have one bike that needs a bit more than the rest so I bring it to the shop. Get a call from the company asking why I took it, they say it was serviced twice in the last few months.
The fork had a bunch of twine wrapped around it, including pushed through the seal. No idea why. Seals and oil were fresh. This was on purpose. Headset had like 2lb of grease in it and bearings were upside down.
The worst part - the rear hub, a fairly new shimano model, for some reason has a 7sp freehub body installed. With 8 cogs of a 9sp cassette. I didn’t even know those old freehub bodies were compatible with the newer hubs.
I think that big corporate security firms are a far cry from the mall cops of the 90s.
The idea of private security scares the shit out of me. They’re mercenary corporate armies. It’s distopian as fuck. Atmo
