Robin Thurston, chairman of the new Outside, is said to dream of building “the Amazon Prime of the active lifestyle: a connected, holistic ecosystem of resources — including content, experiences, utilities, community, commerce, education, and services — that can be customized for each active lifestyle enthusiast.”
He’s certainly proven himself capable of financing his vision. Is bigger better? Is there strength in numbers? Depends on who’s crunching them, I guess.
Our segment kicks off about 33 minutes into the show. Steve Frothingham, editor in chief of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, gets things rolling with a discussion of the year just past in the bike biz and what we might expect in 2021.
Thanks to Diane for giving the Padre, Charles, and me a little corner of her chat room. You can give us a listen by clicking here.
After a long and oddly fruitful year, some bike-shop owners are deciding it’s time to step away from the table while they’re still winners, according to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
My man Steve Frothingham reports that the year was both good and bad for a lot of businesspeople. Good, in that they moved a ton of product, made a bunch of money, and dug out from under a mountain of debt; bad, in that it left them fried, dyed and whipped to the side.
“We’ve done well, I don’t want to mislead anybody,” said one retailer. “It just did start to feel like we were in the store-running business instead of the bicycle business. I realize that the store-running business is where the industry is going, but maybe our talents are better used elsewhere.
“And I have to say, we’re just exhausted.”
Some are changing their business models. Others are selling outright, in some cases to Trek. That’s the route Hill Abell and Laura Agnew took with Bicycle Sport Shop in Austin, Texas.
Bicycle Sport Shop had been suffering a downturn until The Bug® turned bicycles into a must-have item.
As a consequence, 2020 has been “absolutely phenomenal, which allowed us to pay down all of our debt and to actually pay our people more,” Abell said. “So it’s been a really good year for the biking industry if you’re a decent operator.”
Despite the banner year, Abell and Agnew were still looking for a way out, and found it in Trek. The four Bicycle Sport Shop locations will close Jan. 17 and reopen a few days later as Trek stores. The store-running business, as the fella says. So it goes.
Anybody else seeing their favorite local shop go corporate … or just go?
Herb-E doesn’t understand the democratic process. Come to think of it, neither do many of the filthy meat-things.
As long as we’re on the topic of cartoons, and with a jaundiced eye toward lightening our mood going into Election Day, here’s the latest “Shop Talk” strip from Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
For this one I retitled the strip “E-Shop Talk,” and cast Herb-E in the starring role.
Herb-E is the shop’s e-mechanic, in all senses of the word. He’s a bot who works on other bots. And he is decidedly not our friend.
He and all the other e-devices the industry is pushing on us are biding their time, plotting the Rise of the Machines, turning the occasional burglar into lubricants for practice, and awaiting the glorious day when they will no longer require the services of “the filthy meat-things.”
Herb-E is cousin to ev-Rider (below), a short-lived and equally homicidal e-project from 2016, intended to continue “the natural evolution” of battery-powered bicycling by selling robot cyclists to the sedentary.
As the ev-Rider rep told the Mud Stud and Dude, “When only robots ride bikes, well, your customers can focus on what they really care about … kitten videos on Facebook!”
Speaking of the Stud and his bro, while one or the other takes an occasional issue off, the November 2020 cartoon above marks the first time that neither of them appeared in the strip since it launched in January 1992.
When bicycles are bots, only bots will have bicycles.
Some driveway artiste was trying to cheer up the passers-by, if any.
I had a Zoom video chat with the BRAINiacs yesterday. My first! Look at me, being all like hep to the jive an’ shit.
The meeting was late in the day, and I burned a whole lot of daylight indoors doing whatever the hell it is that I do around here lately, so instead of kitting up for a ride to the Dark Tower to resupply Herself the Elder I went out for a brisk half-hour limp around the ’hood.
You can see company coming a long ways off out here in the Sandia foothills.
Distancing was social, and I seem to be limping faster, so, yay.
After the Zoom session I test-drove a couple new recipes that met with Herself’s approval: mushroom quesadillas and arroz verde.
For the quesadillas I used flour tortillas and Monterey Jack rather than corn torts and mozzarella. Also, I baked them in the oven instead of frying them in a pan.
For the rice I went with a blend of mild/hot Hatch chile instead of poblano and jalapeño.
Them was the ingredients I had on hand. And y’know what? It did not suck. Didn’t take any pix because I was too busy eatin‘ them sumbitches.
The Zoom thing was cool, too. I got to see some people I haven’t seen in a while, and nobody sneezed on nobody.
Mad Blog Media 