Postby Tequestra » Wed Mar 07, 2018 12:46 pm
I like the smell of rubber when I walk through the front door of a Local Bike Shop(LBS). The smell of new tyres.
It sends some subtle signal to my brain assuring me that I am in the right place, and that this is a REAL bike shop, with real people who honestly value real cycling and respect those who do it. Such experiences in the past have often transpired with that sweet smell of rubber in the air when we do business. K-Mart's bicycle section just doesn't have that same smell about it.
In Perth in the late '80s, I used to double as the third delivery driver in the afternoons when things were busy and there were more Indi-500s already prepared for delivery by the loading dock than assembled units awaiting the finishing touches, which I'd usually do in the mornings and half the afternoons as my main job.
At 18 years, I was menace truck driver back then, racing from shop to shop as fast as physically possible, with little regard for the law, and so they always knew who'd get a pair of 27" ladies down to Mandurah in a hurry the fastest, and that is how I got to explore the smell of rubber in the bicycle shops across Perth, (on the understanding that they would not pay my speeding fines). I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self the way The World really works back then.
Over the decades since 1989, cycling in Perth has enjoyed sporadic growth spurts along the way, and a new style of bike shop became more profitable by keeping the smell of rubber out of the noses of affluent 'yuppie' consumers, if you don't mind me bashing my point over an ill-fitting factual trend.
I don't feel at ease doing business in some sparkly, shiny showroom with gleaming bikes and grinning teenagers to get advice from. It is a kind of sense I get, that these kinds of shops tend to train their shop assistants as sales professionals, not so much as cycling professionals.
Perhaps the 'gentrification' of Fremantle since the America's Cup in 1987 has led some shops to change their sales policy from "Hello fellow cyclist, how can I help you?" to "Hello sucker, have I got a deal for YOU today!" and that sort of atttitude that just wastes my time when I am not the one getting paid for it.
I checked out a couple of shops in Fremantle before turning to AliExpress to spend my spare cash. Friendly, knowledgeable management, sometimes good staff I suppose, but with every purchase, I was always thinking about the sky-high rents that they might probably be paying in such an expensive 'tourist' area, (not that tourists from China come here to buy bicycle parts off the shelf), and always realised that it was not the bike shop trying to rip me off, but the landlords ripping them off which forced them to have to rip me off.
I would only buy it locally if I needed it in a hurry, because the cost of reliable shipping, (NOT Aus Post), from China means one must plan carefully and order in bulk from AliExpress if possible, to reduce total shipping costs.
Recently I've put AliExpress into twelve months' purgatory for screwing up the last order in September, and so I have explored the LBS environment a bit more, and bought a ten dollar brake cable at one shop I remember from the '80s, and it is a lot more snazzy today since Fremantle grew from a working-class area to a yuppie zone. The same fellow still runs the place, and I presume owns the building. There is trust there, but no smell of rubber.
The other LBS I finally found eventually is closer to home, and the only reason I didn't buy that brake cable there in the first place was because they open at 10am, and I was there at 8:30am for the first visit, so that was why I headed off to the shop mentioned above for it, which opened at 9am (because he lives out the back I suppose).
This shop smells of rubber! I bought nice new mid-mount kickstand there for my big black 'ute' bike I ride around to buy supplies. $20 brand new, adjustable length and Steve in the shop even knew to ask me if I had a big enough allen-key for the bolt, before exchanging it for a hex-bolt so I could fit it.
Then when I went back the next week to buy a $29 seat-post for Tequestra the Tequesta, after making sure I knew the right size for the frame, (which I had never known of such a difference before having only worked on bikes in the '80s when all seatposts were 26.2mm and no one bothered to measure it), do you know what Steve did for me?
He went out the back and found a plastic sealable bag, and dabbed a finger covered in blue grease in the bag, sealed it and gave it to me, so I gave him $30 for the seat post and he has now won himself a loyal customer for life, for the price of a dob of blue grease which the loyal customer paid a dollar for anyway.
Being on the edge of a light-industrial area, I don't expect that the rent at this shop is nearly as inflated as the poor shops in the centre of the 'tourist' areas, and the prices I have found to be no more than what it would cost me to buy from China and then pay $40/kg for shipping.
What makes this LBS a preferred choice over AliExpress is realistic, fair pricing, professional management and staff who care about cycling and thus care about cyclists like myself, and that unforgettable, courteous, surprise dob of grease when I needed it (all I usually have at home thesedays is WD-40 and singer sewing-machine oil). Maybe I should not have been surprised, because that LBS smells so much more of rubber than any of the others I have been into in the past couple of years.
PS: That's one thing you can't get on The Internet: The smell of rubber.
Viva le Tour Electrique' !!!
Can get in 20l drums, too.