Very interesting video below
Haven’t been a bicycle nut since the 1970s I feel. I’ve got good insight into how the bike industry has gone from what it was to what it is now in most parts of the world.
So in 1970s with had a bicycle boom with BMX bikes.
A number of brands in New Zealand started to make BMX like bikes and a few brands started making bikes like the Healing HMX 500 BMX bikes.
But only in one size, with the old style Bike shops that was it or a new 3 Speed bike and that was it in most of the bike shops in New Zealand.
So I purchased a secondhand Raleigh 20 bicycle and cut it up and made my first BMX bike to fit myself and enjoyed riding and racing it.
This lead me to working in a motorcycle shop and doing my apprenticeship in Motorcycle Engineering.
I looked at the mountain bikes a few shops were importing from the USA in the early 1980s like the original Mongoose ATB (the original name for mountain bikes) but on apprenticeship wages I could not afford that sort of money and I kept dreaming and reading books instead then in 1985 Healing came out with the Wildcat 18 mountain bike and I was able to purchase one through work and enjoy riding it off-road and all over the Northland where I could.
Then in 1987, I went on my first O.E. (Overseas Experience) and came across a much flasher bicycle store but it was interesting to go through because they had all sorts of bikes from low into high-end and things heading away and all sorts of spots spent hours in the shops in London and about UK. We are purchased my first serious, US made Canondale SM800 mountain bike.
It was so brutal that almost put me off cycling forever but in the end I upgraded to a custom built bike that suited myself and my needs and was much easier riding but the shops were interesting because you could find all sorts of interesting knickknacks. Now this leads me to today started working at one of the local bike shops in my hometown and it started off with a good collection of different brains of bikes but then he chose one brand that was extremely good and had a decent range but over the years it became more set up as per the brand thought a bicycle shop should look and if you go to other bicycle shops with that brand they are set up like a corporate Cycling Shop was hiring bikes, prominent and all the shelves laid out in the same order that you could go to another store and almost on the left is the tubes on the right is something else and the scares off as I’ve seen from the years of experience more more people who just want to bike to go riding but go and find high end bicycles with the cheaper ones hidden the way or not even being sold.
The biggest bike shop despite other corporate cycling shops is the local warehouse who sell a number of cheap bikes that are really rubbish but people are put off with the corporate looking and laid out cycling shops because they just wanna bike to go riding with the kids or two work, etc and they don’t understand that the warehouse that sells them. The cheap bikes sells them the rubbish that will last only a few weeks when there was other bikes that are made much better that are available somewhere overseas in a few elites cycle shops around New Zealand.
So I feel that the major cycle brands are missing the point they are getting stuck in their own advertising and then elite cycling thinking and forgetting about the average Joe blogs who’s just wants to go cycling and does not care about what brand of bike it is if it’s just got super Duper group set or if it’s blue or pink or whatever they just want the bike to go riding that stops and changes gear safely.
Hopefully in the near future will see more like Bike Shops again and welcoming the average Joe blogs to enjoy their transport.
