chris@canootervalve.com

Munitions Dump

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Jul 042012
 

Just breaking my duck and cover for brief post today. Turns out, people in the Northwest really like fireworks. I mean, I thought my rednecks back home in PA liked themselves some fireworks, but there’s not really any comparison. Fireworks are not only legal here; they seem to be mandatory.

Here’s just 30 seconds of life on my back porch in the subdivision last night. Keep in mind this was shot on July third. They’ve been at this all week, and this is all just shit average Joes launch from their decks and driveways here, I guess to catch each others houses on fire.

I’m still acclimating. Hope to see everybody on the 5th.

McFly

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Jul 032012
 

You’re looking at the new DeLorean bicycle. Yes, that DeLorean. After the streak of genuinely interesting brand collaboration bicycles that included the mini-moto Audi/Ducati bike and the Aston Martin Factor bike, I’ll admit I’m having a bit of trouble situating the stainless steel DeLorean somewhere on the continuum between “losing all desire to live” and “hey, that’s pretty OK.”

Normally, it’d be a goof-magnet, and at almost $5500, it certainly meets the Decadent Excess criteria, but I’m thrown off by the president of DeLorean, Stephen Wynne’s meta-like realization that he’s being asked to participate in the bullshit fashion world accessorizing of bicycles:

When Wynne was first approached about the idea, he was skeptical. ‘I basically, said, “Yeah, I’m interested, but I don’t want to do a $5,000 bike that’s really a $200 Asian bike with a badge on it,” he says, ‘which you customarily see from other brands.’ Wynne was quickly persuaded, however, that expanding the DeLorean name from four-wheels to two wouldn’t be a shameless, superficial exercise in branding. This is because the bike and the car share a core strand of DNA: the stainless steel body.

‘They said, “No, we want to do a stainless steel bike because stainless steel is the new cool, if you’re into bikes,” he says. ‘It’s sort of taken over from carbon fiber.'”

All this begs the question, “Is it still a shameless and pointless tie-in if you know it’s a shameless and pointless tie-in?”

Or if you believe stainless steel has “sort of taken over from carbon fiber.” Nice as it is, stainless steel certainly won’t be replacing carbon fiber any time soon, but I can just picture the bullshit meeting at which a line like that squeaks out into the room. Besides, everybody knows it’s granite, not stainless steel, that’s taking over from carbon fiber.

Best to ponder that while we move to SRAM’s 1×11 group, which is apparently going to be a reality, based on some near production looking photos popping up at Bicycle Retailer, Bikerumor and Bikeradar.

Remember the impromptu and completely unprofessional poll I took on the 1×11 group, in which the vast majority of readers needed to know the cost, but many others just plain hated all over it? Based on current info. I doubt those original results are going to be overturned. SRAM’s beast of a cassette will, it appears, require a proprietary hub from one of a few wheelset manufacturers (DT Swiss and SRAM are mentioned, but by now we all know Mavic is also fond of longer than currently fashionable cassette bodies, too). So it’s coming, and it’s going to need a new kind of cassette body.

The problem I see here is that if you can’t show a new item with at least some connection to Enve Composites–and preferably sporting the Enve rims–it’s not technically possible for anyone to consider it cool. Here then we encounter the unfriendly intersection between Proprietary Cutting-edge Gadgetry and Artisanal Badassery–at least until somebody somewhere can capture a photo of the igloo-sized Powerdome 11-speed cassette on a wheel sporting an Enve rim.

For what it’s worth, my own wide range cassette idea–zip-tying a 53t chainring directly to my spokes and running it just inside my 34t “large” cog–is unable to be patented due to some extremely narrow-minded thinking on the part of the U.S. Patent Office re. the use of zip-ties as “structural members.”

But they’ll come around eventually.

Jul 022012
 

Pringles, trail mix AND $4.00 DVDs? I have no idea why Best Buy is losing share to online retailers.

I had to use a Best Buy recently, which I think is the digital consumer equivalent of admitting you had to go to the doctor to have an ass boil lanced. Having read various articles predicting the demise of big box consumer electronics stores in the age of online retail, I was curious to see if the experience was any less horrible than my last trip. It wasn’t.

I’m pretty sure I’m well below the pay grade of any decision-makers in the Marketing and Merchandising division of Best Buy, but I think if my business were on the edge of extinction due to online retailers, I’d be inclined to move away from the “dimply lit yardsale filled with talking gnomes” model and toward something resembling a positive consumer experience. I know everyone goes on and on about how pricing is what’s killed the brick and mortar retailer, but I really don’t think that’s it.

I think they’re killing themselves.

And I’m not just talking about the new “retail walk of shame” Best Buy seems to have borrowed from Barnes and Noble–only without that fussy, English-professor-esque whiff of class and relevance. Instead of running the B&N gauntlet of tote bags, coffee mugs and bad post cards, trying to escape Best Buy, I was forced to walk though the silly maze of closeout crap you see above. At Best Buy, the merchandise on the RWOS isn’t even relevant to Best Buy, let alone my life, but I don’t think they mind. In fact, Best Buy doesn’t even try to hide that fact that they’re routing you away from the cash registers and then back toward them through a shit pile of bad merchandise on the off chance that you’d suddenly want some $3.00 headphones or potato chips. The impression is that you’re in a store that’s going out of business, which is, of course, the case.

But the store is the least of their problems.

More than any other store, Best Buy forces me to avoid “customer service” people, and while I’ve not had as appalling an experience as described in Larry Downes’ Forbes article from last December, few places cause as much sales agent anxiety as Best Buy due to the fear of what Downes aptly describes as “anti-service.” Simply put: you’re more likely to come away from any experience with a sales agent at Best Buy less satisfied than you would be if no one spoke to you during your visit.

Reasons for this are many. Unlike the thoughtful and reasoned analysis Downes offers, though, I can simply resort to crude short-hand: Best Buy is still acting like a big company, and there are no more “big companies.” They seem to have failed to grasp the most substantial change the Internet has caused: we expect personal service. With the exception of Wal-Mart, who’s done a masterful job of targeting the ever-shrinking base of consumers who don’t realize the Internet exists, there is no such thing as a corporate retail juggernaut any more–a place capable of winning sales and loyal customers without engaging with those customers are people.

Ironically, the sure sign that you’re about to be treated like cattle is the “greeter.” Both Wal-Mart and Best Buy have them, and they’re appalling. Does anyone under the age of 80 honestly feel more warmly welcomed just because a front door lurker offers a “hello”? It’s the biggest kind of phony bullshit service, and the post boy for where they’ve gone wrong. When logging into an e-commerce site posts a “Hello Chris” account link in the upper corner of my screen, it means my shopping history and preferences have been queued up, and that my records and info. are available for me to review or change. The Best Buy equivalent isn’t similarly “social” because it doesn’t actually involve knowledge of me or my shopping at all. In fact, the greeter invariably gets in the way of my shopping experience, if you want to call it that, at Best Buy. It tells me Best Buy values paying a kid to stand around saying hello all day more than it values paying salaries for employees willing to genuinely be helpful.

In other words, you can’t fake giving a shit about people, and when it comes to customer service–more than pricing or sales tax–online retailers are so far superior to companies like Best Buy that the contrast is almost shocking.

How it’s come to this, I don’t know, but Best Buy and other big box retailers have failed to turn their storefronts into assets, allowing them instead to become major liabilities. Wild pipe dream or not, imagine for a second what a positive, consumer-driven change would look like at Best Buy. Realizing you need a product, you’d be able to quickly and easily verify that your local store had what you needed in stock. If they did, you’d order, walk in to a pick up area, swipe your card for ID and be handed your order. If the nearest store didn’t have what you needed, an inventory transfer would put it there within a day or two and send you a text message to let you know it had arrived.

In both cases, gone is the greeter. In his place is a way to get the items you wanted and get the hell out of the abandoned airplane hanger that is your local Best Buy. Come to think of it, maybe a few extra light bulbs wouldn’t hurt, either.

Virtually Identical

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Jun 292012
 

I know enough about suspension systems to understand how unbearable life must be for engineers sometimes. Bikerumor posted this info about the new Merida suspension system–the “VPP, er, uh, VPK” yesterday. Some of you will no doubt realize just from the photo above that this thing’s only similarity to a Santa Cruz VPP bike in that it has a couple short links and two wheels. Other than that, it’s sort of the opposite, which Santa Cruz engineer and dude who makes thinking cool, Joe Graney, took the time to clarify with this comment:

Merida’s VPK suspension uses two short links that rotate in the same direction. This is a similar configuration to DW Link, Maestro, CVT and others. VPP suspension patents and the mechanisms are based on links that rotate in opposite directions. This is the key differentiator that gives VPP the ability to tune shock rates and pedaling behavior independently.

While Merida may have designed a bike that descends with aplomb, their design is not based on VPP, but their marketing angle for their (recently renamed VPK from VPP which is trademarked internationally by Santa Cruz) most definitely is.”

I’ve always found–with no exceptions whatsoever–that reading things written by People Who Know Something tends to always be way more entertaining than reading things written by people who just write. I’m not sure if Joe’s response above is hilarious to everyone, or if a few bike nerd-gencia snorted milk out of our noses at it, but I can tell you that if he’d put “aplomb” in quotation marks, I would literally have spit coffee all over my monitor.

Joe’s a gentleman, though, to have only pointed out the marketing thing. There’s a lot more about this situation that he wisely choose not to get into. I’m neither tactful nor wise, though.

For starters, the marketing thing is offensively bad. You can’t really blame Bikerumor for inferring a connection between a frame that literally has “VPP” stickers on it, and some kind of Santa Cruz connection, if not an actual licensing deal.

I have no idea what the hell Merida was thinking with such a blatant copyright violation. They’re a huge company–is there no one on the payroll in charge of preventing obviously stupid shit from happening? At least they’ve since come up with their own horrible acronym: “Virtual Pivot Kinematics.” That combines the flagrant rip-off of Santa Cruz with an added bullshit word currently enjoying some popularity. Brilliant.

But the copyright issue seems the least of their problems. If this new “VPK” doesn’t infringe on at least one of Dave Weagle’s patents, it’s not for lack of trying. This is, in fact, the same off-the-rack Taiwan suspension system that’s been showing up at Interbike every few years, and finally ended up on a Look full-suspension bike, which might manage to stay off DW’s lawn only because the pivot seems to have been pushed so far back as to lose the benefits of a DW-link entirely.

My salty bitching really comes down to this, though: there’s nothing new or interesting going on here. What we have is a design that was being used for Look (I’d not be shocked to find out Merida builds the Look frames), that Merida re-tooled just enough to make worse. How so? By stranding the upper link’s lower pivot in the middle of nowhere, they’ve forced a whole extra chunk of metal to be added to this thing, just to support that. They’ve also figured out a way to position the shock in the worst of all locations–the one that gives you no water bottle options and requires a stronger, heavier downtube that’s capable of handling the stress of a shock nearly t-boning it.

On paper anyway, that bike is a mess. Which brings me back to my point.

If you’ve turned yourself inside out to engineer a really different suspension system–one that tries to do very specific things–and you see something like “Virtual Pivot Kinematics,” you die a little inside.

Maybe the Merida rides OK. The company certainly supports athletes and wins races in Europe, and more power to them, but to compare the time and energy that went into the Merida suspension system shown there with something like a Santa Cruz just doesn’t seem fair, because I promise their development cycles were completely different.

New Directions

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Jun 282012
 

It’s pretty hard to write about bicycles while Colorado is on fire. The photos that have surfaced so far are horrifying, and we can only hope for a break in the weather and continued safety for everyone in harm’s way–especially the people fighting the fire. Red Bull athletes aren’t too shabby, but the men and women on the front line of that shit are brave.

Speaking of horrifying photos, have you seen Pinarello’s mountain bike? While I’d hate to be the person in charge of warranty service there, I have to give them credit. In a world of “me-too” cookie cutter carbon fiber 29ers, it takes some serious orgoglio to say, “Screw that, let’s overlap the seatstays and see what happens.”

And why the hell not? I mean other than killing off your demographic, which I’m pretty sure is a marketing mistake. At any rate, they’ll die doing what they loved: riding a $10k mountain bike around on bike paths.

In better news, it looks like Aston Martin is continuing the trend we first saw with Audi’s insane electric bike, and releasing an Aston Martin bicycle that isn’t just another hybrid with a decimal out of place in the price tag.

Don’t get me wrong. They forgot the decimal point entirely in the rumored $40k Aston Martin/Factor One-77 collaboration bike, but at least it’s sufficiently bizarre to warrant a freakish price. I’d thought this was the same Factor chassis Steve Domahidy helped design, but apparently this predates that, so now I’m all confused by Factor. Even their name is a mathematical thing. Intimidating.

I like the bikes, though, and they’re a legitimately different animal, but this isn’t surprising. Aston Martin actually has a bit of a history of getting custom bike collaborations a little closer to “right” than, say, Porsche or Chrysler. They’d previously chosen to work with small frame builders instead of slapping their badge on just anything picked out of a catalog–and they were able to articulate why they made that decision.

Taken together, I think the One-77 and Pinarello Dogma 29er are really positive signs. Sure, the Pinarello scares me to death with seat stays anchored with a stem faceplate badge, but both bikes are legitimately something different, and we need more of that.

http://www.luxurylaunches.com/transport/aston_martin_one77_bicycle_launched.php

Jun 272012
 

Forget 650b. If you’ve seen the Czech flying bicycle, you know he future of bicycles is all about air travel. Sure, this thing is a catastrophe, but also an enigma. What, for instance, is the Surly connection here? Check out the video and see if you can figure out why this thing has fat bike tires?

Landing gear, I guess.

In other gadget news, Google is officially scaring the hell out of me now. Self-driving cars and googly eyes were one thing, but Lolcat-loving artificial intelligence and electronic brains are just a bit much. Fast Company is reporting that Google has created an artificial brain.

Google’s brain, more or less undirected through a process of repetition, developed a ‘concept’ of human faces and the different parts of a human body from these images, and also a concept of cats. ‘Concept’ here means a fuzzy ill-understood pattern that it could use to categorize a new image it had not seen before, based on its previous learning. The cats concept was a surprise to the researchers, but given the fact that YouTube is a skewed data set, and that we humans do love Lolcats and their like, perhaps it was inevitable.”

Not scared yourself, yet? Check out the human face “concept” of Google’s fake brain.

Starting to look like zombie apocalypse could be our best case scenario.

Carrying a Torch

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Jun 262012
 

I have no idea what that picture means (I found it on a blog called SentimentalMechanic.com), but I wish Jesus would teach me to weld. If Evel Knievel’s regret was that he never killed anybody (certainly not for lack of trying, if suicide counts), my great regret is that I never learned to weld. Also, that I don’t have my own CNC machines. Not that I have a lot of free time, but if I did, I would love to be a complete menace to the entire neighborhood with Tesla-grade mad scientist hardware in the garage. If I’d learned to weld and machine, at least some version of Project Danzig would already be done.

I was thinking about this over the weekend, when I thought I’d lost my trusty Pivot 429, a frame I’ve had almost as long as I’d been working on my own frame. I love it, but a part of me hoped I’d have a prototype of my own frame by now. For one terrifying moment, I thought I’d lost the 429, and a bunch of years have gone by without a prototype.

I’d run into Wal-Mart to drop off a Redbox movie this weekend–we have no TV right now, so we’re watching recent Nicolas Cage movies and seeing who cracks first. I hadn’t planned on stopping, so my Pivot 429 is on the back of the car, unlocked.

Off I scramble toward the Redbox kiosk inside the store, constantly looking over my shoulder. Still there. Still there. Still there. And then I’m inside the store, at the Redbox machine. I click “Return.” Nothing. Unresponsive. Again. Again nothing. The Redbox machine does not want Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance back, which I understand completely. Still, as the person who paid to watch a Nicolas Cage movie, I feel a Redbox representative should’ve already come to my house to pick it up and apologize. In fact, I’m thinking Nicolas Cage should be personally traveling across the country to check this movie out of every Redbox in America permanently, and Stan Lee should probably be driving the dumptruck.

This is what’s going through my mind when the machine finally, grudgingly, accepts Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance back into its bowels.

And I’m off. Boom, out the Wal-Mart doors and moving across the parking lot toward my unlocked Pivot, which is no longer on the back of my car.

Um.

Oh.

Temporarily, I’m not sure if one continues walking toward the car in this case, turns around, or starts hopping up and down, hands on cheeks, screaming. I go with walking toward the car. And then I notice my car, and my bike. In just the time it took me to return the movie, another white Subaru Outback pulled in only a car away from mine. In the Northwest, only VW vans outnumber Subaru Outbacks.

I’m not good at interpreting dreams–particularly when they happen in broad daylight in a Wal-Mart parking lot and aren’t dreams–but I think I need to find a way to build myself a prototype. So many things are still going on with the patent license, but more than anything, I just want to ride one of these bikes.

All Ears

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Jun 252012
 

There’s a great article over at Fast Company describing the new “social media command centers” some companies are using to “capture, monitor, and utilize social media conversations.” Certainly sounds cool, but I can’t help but think all this talk of “response strategies,” “feedback internalization,” and “two-way conversations” is just the latest version of “this call may be monitored for training purposes”?

Dell, for instance, is cited as a specific example in the article:

Dell’s ground control center tracks around 22,000 daily posts about the company across a wide range of social media, and enables Dell to participate in online dialogue about their brand and use social media insights to improve their products and marketing.”

But everyone knows what sucks so bad about Dell. They subsidize the cost of everything by filling your computer with bloatware programs that make it run like ass. They also skin their vendors alive on pricing until the hardware in your PC makes the back aisles at RadioShack look pretty advanced. Will hearing that change their business model? Of course not.

Oddly, it seems like a lot of the companies investing so heavily in monitoring social media would be much better to allocate funds toward simply not being dicks. According to Manish Mehta, Dell’s VP of social media and community,”Ground Control is about tracking the largest number of possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback, good or bad . . . . It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’–those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there, and deserve to be heard.”

Right.

When it comes to large corporations, social media is all about pretending to give a shit, but the upside is that it requires actual human beings not just to give that shit, but even to pretend to give it. That’s the social media trap many companies are finding themselves in these days: they thought they could bullshit their way through it like they have so many other things involving customers, but the whole idea that social media is a two-way conversation ruins the whole automated bone-tossing bit. You have to engage with people.

The monstrous industry that’s evolved to support circumventing direct communication with people is certainly impressive. Effective, though? Difficult to say. Other than some game theory time-wasting, it’s tough to say what consumers actually get out of the new communication channels, clogged as they are with “command center” specialists listening and reacting, while still insulating the actual corporate decision-makers. Dell, I’m afraid to reveal, does not actually love you and want to have coffee with you. Even Apple thinks you’re kind of a pain in the ass, frankly.

A few bicycle frame manufacturers, in contrast are in touch with their consumers. Why, because they engage in the same activity as the consumers. That’s why the sight of something like this Kirklee Bikerumor posted recently makes many people who ride bicycles happy.

If you ride a bike, you stand a better chance of understanding what people who ride bikes want. That way, you don’t even have “like” them in order to make the products they want.

Jun 222012
 

Rick Vosper has published a really interesting post over at BicycleRetailer.com. Based on fresh data from the Gluskin-Townley group’s National Bicycle Dealer Association (NBDA) report, Vosper seems to pretty effectively dispel the myth of a “Big Three” stranglehold on independent bike dealers.

Except that maybe he doesn’t. As Vosper puts it:

Turns out there’s a total of 143 bike brands active in the US market (down from 150 last year). Moreover, in terms of which brands are tops in which shops and/or markets, it’s not Trek, Giant, or Specialized that leads the pack. Not Raleigh or Cannondale or Haro or Diamondback or Schwinn, or any of the top brands we’d all expect.

On a purely representative basis, the leading brand in the country is . . . ‘Other.’ And it has been for years.”

The suggestion is that smaller companies are, in aggregate, a serious force in the U.S. bicycle industry.

As much as I’d like to believe that, I just can’t. In the past, I did quite well with niche brands, and I wish others could too, but empirical data derived from something I call “walking into any bike shop in the U.S.” suggests neither Specialized nor Trek need fear any smaller companies.

A part of the disconnect might be the method used for gathering the data. According to Jay Townley, whose group conducted the research, the data was gathered “based on a survey of more than 300 independent bike shops,” where “the basic question” . . . “was to write in their bestselling bicycle brands, not numbers, but bestselling brands based on unit volume.”

Um, OK.

So the questioning was maybe a little subjective. Could that affect things? Poor Trek and Specialized tend to suffer from what I like to call the “Nickleback Syndrome”: they make shit-tons of money even while shop rats sometimes think it’s not cool to be a “Trek shop” or “Specialized shop.” That’s just the “freedom” twitch, wherein a dealer or shop rat doesn’t want to believe he’s bought and sold based on the whims of his vendor. No one admits to liking Nickleback. Yet they still come to your city and get suck all over it. Go figure.

But how accurate was the data? That’s the question. It’s possible the official Gluskin-Townley report describes how rigorously the data was checked against inventory management systems, etc. but, given my experience in bicycle retail, “rigorous” just isn’t a term that comes up all that often (come to think of it, “inventory management” doesn’t even come up very often).

I’m also not entirely clear how to square the notion that Specialized, Trek and Giant still likely dominate “in terms of total unit sales,” without being a “bestselling” brand. To me, then, this report raises more questions than it answers. Sure, we have Redline, Fuji and the QBP brands chipping away at market share, but if they’re effectively doing that, then how could it not be reflected in sales? As much as I want to believe in this report, taken at face value, it seems to suggest dealers are primarily flooring bike brands that don’t make them money.

What’s more, they’re flooring bikes that don’t make them money despite the pressures from their Big Three overlords to knock that shit off.

Seems wrong.

It’s possible the data is just skewed. We know “more than 300 independent bike shops” were used for this analysis. In the absence of hard data, we have to assume “more than 300” effectively means like “302.” If there are roughly 5000 IBDs in the U.S. that’d be about 6% of them that were polled. If we figure we’re down to 4500 IBDs and sort of put a thumb on the good news scale here, probably the most we can get is about 7-7.5% of dealers surveyed in this sample. Statistically, this should still be enough to give us a pretty accurate reading (low margin of error), but there tends to be wide variance between IDBs, meaning I could find 300 shops in the U.S. that don’t carry Trek or Specialized. Usually every larger town has one of those “also ran” shops that can’t get one of the Big Three (and may well be a better shop than those that can). This matters.

So I’m questioning how reliable this data can be–or even if it has any intrinsic value whatsoever. If you don’t sell Trek, you don’t represent them on your floor. If you polled 7% of the shops in the U.S., how many of those shops were selling Trek or Specialized? Wouldn’t that affect the results? When you can’t get the big brands, you represent the smaller brands. Call 300 shops that don’t sell Trek or Specialized, and you get a snap shot of what life is like at the bottom of the retail food chain, not how healthy the Big Three’s grip is around the neck of the U.S. bike dealer.

In other words, “representation” is a bullshit made-up term. More usable data would seem to be what revenue each brand is generating for that representative sample of retailers across the country. Ask each shop: what are your top ten bike lines, in terms of revenue? If your shop is filled with Raleighs because you can’t get Trek or Specialized, then way to go for you and Raleigh, but good luck breaking the $1.5M sales mark. What really matters is this: are you able to compete with the shop that has Trek or Specialized? That’s the real question. The report suggests an interesting variation based on total sales revenue: “At $300,000 or less, Trek is #7; Redline is #1. At $3000-5000, Trek is #2,Raleighis [sic] #1. Where Trek has its hold is in the million-plus-dollar retailers. Trek is not #1 in all regions of the country, nor are they #1 in all size stores. It varies.”

Well, yeah. Your store’s revenue varies based on whether or not you sell Specialized, Trek or Giant. If you can’t get those lines, good fucking luck making more than $300k a year. Wouldn’t that seem to be the opposite of Vosper’s point? To suggest this is evidence of some kind of “representational” pattern, I submit to you, is the worst kind of tail wagging dog argument. “Where Trek has its hold is in the million-plus-dollar retailers.” Yes, the ones making money.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Vosper has written a fascinating article, I love what he’s clearly wishing and hoping for here (even if I can’t believe in it), and I have a great deal of respect for what the Gluskin-Townley group tries to do (gathering data in this industry is like bailing out a leaking canoe with a spork), but don’t let’s get to dreaming up scenarios where the little guys can compete based on some mystical “representation” number. Vosper’s evocation of the Long-tail theory is apt here, but maybe not for the reasons he suggests. The vast majority of small shops cater to a smaller and more eclectic segment of the industry because that’s the only brand real estate left to them. Those smaller shops aren’t successful because they don’t have any of the Big Three brands–they’re successful despite not having them. It’s a testament to how hard most of those shops work to take care of customers.

Dopey

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Jun 212012
 

Over the past year, I’ve dealt with some life-alteringly bad bullshit, but the view from my new back porch does a lot to make up for it.

Now I just need to some time on a bike. Between living in hotels and eating garbage for months now, my normal “awful” fitness level has deteriorated into “super awful” range. Having just unpacked my moving truck to find the moving crew we’re hired to help hadn’t put so much as a napkin between my daughter’s Santa Cruz Juliana and my Co-Motion was just that extra little kick in the nards I absolutely did not need today.

Unable to ride bikes right now, I find myself thinking about them a lot, and it’s impossible to miss the current Lance Armstrong saga. Because I still have a lot of boxes to unpack and need to sketch a brief bike company business plan (it’s a long story), I’ll keep this short: something like six years ago my friend, Jeremy, made an interesting point when it comes to Armstrong and doping allegations. “Why are all these ex-U.S.Postal guys getting nabbed for doping only after they leave Armstrong’s former team?”

Think about it. I wouldn’t trust Floyd Landis as far as Barry Bonds could throw him, but are we really supposed to believe all of these ex-Postal riders started doping only after leaving the team? While I tend to be in the camp of people who believe Armstrong’s transcended sport and become a kind of positive force for good in the world, I’m also practical enough to realize many revolutionaries and great leaders are often assholes with decidedly checkered pasts. Mentally, I think most of us are prepared for the worst. All that really matters at this point is that any Armstrong blowback doesn’t hurt the bicycle industry as much as we’re all afraid it might.