In the spring, the big news was that Trek is aiming to cut its SKUs by 40% for 2024. People inside the industry freaked out about what that means. Giant had just released their annual report, too, which showed them down, globally by 16%. And if you read the online scuttlebutt from shop owners (or just talk to them as I do regularly), and you learn that an awful lot of them have been looking to eBikes to claw their way back to pre-pandemic revenue numbers.
As an aside, if you want to understand the state of the retail part of the bike industry, you should read Rick Vosper in Bicycle Retailer. If that’s a lot deeper than you want to go with your passing curiosity about the business of bike shops, don’t worry. I read Rick regularly.
Here’s something from one of his spring columns that made me throw up in my mouth a little.
Vosper: Pedal-only bike imports for 2023 were down by a whopping 41% from 2022, which itself was down just over 31% from 2021. The 2023 number of 5.4 million units represents the all-time lowest number of pedal-only imports since 1981, which is as far back as my numbers go.
Now I’m not one for hand wringing, because bikes are fun. They’ll always be fun. And there is no natural law that bike shops will remain cool or solvent or looking anything like I want them to look, BUT…this reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with Rob Vandermark at Seven Cycles.
No one who knows Rob wouldn’t say he’s a smart guy, one of the smarter ones even, and when, in a casual business meeting someone asked him what he thought about selling electric Sevens, he said something like…this is paraphrasing hard…”I’m not saying we never will, but if we do, it’ll be because this thing we do, making pedaled bikes, is over. Because people won’t pedal if they don’t have to.” And that sort of ended that conversation.
Even our own Padraig makes the better part of his living, currently, writing about eBikes, and that too is a sign that all is not entirely well in the non-electrified side of cycling.
None of this should be construed as judgment, by the way. I’m not at all against eBikes. Quite the opposite. The more people on bicycles the better, for our planet and for our communities. I’ll leave it at that.
But we may already be in the paradigm shift. Retailers are looking to eBikes, because they bring in new customers. Not only that, but existing customers who are getting on in years or just like the feeling of that sweet, sweet pedal assist, are moving to eBikes also. That explains the hope retail has for them, but also the dwindling numbers of pedal-only bikes in the world.
I have probably grown a bit boring with my constant cheerleading for bike shops. I do that because I love bike shops, and I want there to be bike shops everywhere forever. I wonder if we’re entering a period when we’ll also be cheerleading for pedal bikes as folks gravitate toward eBikes.
They’re already pretty affordable, especially relative to high-end pedal bikes, and if you look at the long arc of cycling, we have always tried to make the riding part easier. In the beginning, we had single-speeds, and we wanted gears. We got a few gears, and we wanted more gears, always to make riding easier. I get it. Hills are hard. Speed is fun.
I’m going to try to maintain some emotional distance from all of this. I’m going to try not to see it like I’m losing something, but rather that bicycles are finding their way forward in ways I didn’t foresee. None of that keeps me from riding the way I want to. There are more disruptions to the industry and the culture to come, and we need to be careful not to fall for false dichotomies, not to separate into factions, because, as we can all see, that produces nothing very much fun at all.
Thank you for this, it’s immediately one of my favorites. Me/you, Us/them seems so very deeply a part of us; pointing it out to provide perspective feels like an important service.