The bike shops I've applied to have offered the same as I was making at #REI or better. Except one yesterday offered me less and no other benefits and then seemed shocked when I asked about healthcare. The owner seemed to care about his employees, but was also confused about not being able to find anyone. I get that bike shops as a business model just don't work in the U.S., but where do places like this expect to find workers with no rent to pay or other bills at all?
Bike shops are really a good place to see through "the free market will set labor prices adequately" lie that right-libertarian types like to spout though. Every single bike shop I've applied to and especially#REI where I used to work is desperate for mechanics, but also unwilling to pay for them. I think that's partially because traditional bike shops are just a bad business model in the U.S. and partially because of the usual problems with the owner/employee divide.
In the U.S. most people who have money treat #bicycles like toys, and the people commuting with them generally are doing it because they don't have money for a car so no one is willing to pay much for repairs. At the same time bicycle infrastructure and other amenities that would make a location good for a bike shop bring rent prices way up, selling bicycles is very low overhead, and you have to keep most of your money tied up in huge inventories. It's just not a viable business model.
@sam The economics of bicycles is peculiar. Like, it's hard to save money buying a used bicycle because replacing the wear parts and tuning everything up costs about half of the price of a cheap new bike.
@sanedragonsort of, I always tell people to buy used if they can. The cheapest new bike that won't just fall apart is about $500 or somewhere in there, but if you have someone with expertise to help examine the bike for you, which is a big "if" I know, you can get a $200 bike that's a few years old, a $100 tune up and have high end components and a nice frame! Probably depends where you are, but a few used shops around here have great old bikes for super cheap!
Something of this shape happens in an organized fashion in larger cities in Switzerland: an association of bike users (https://www.pro-velo.ch/) organizes bike flea markets (as in, the bikes being sold aren't theirs -- they only provide organization). Apart from some amount of inspecting of the bikes for sale (I'm not sure how thorough) what they also do is get mechanics to answer sellers' questions.
@robryk@sanedragon oh I love that idea! I would love to see something like that around here where buyers know that a mechanic has looked it over and sellers get the benefit of more buyers browsing all at once!
have mechanics to answer questions (for example, it's sometimes not obvious if a bike can take panniers),
try to figure out if any of the bikes are stolen beforehand,
deal with actually selling the bike so the seller doesn't need to be there the whole day (they just drop off the bike in the morning and pick up money or bike in the evening),
have some sort of setup where you can take one of the bikes for a test ride.
In general it seems to me that a large part of the reason why that feels very nice (from a buyer's perspective at least) is that they remove incentives to be dishonest, so that everyone taking part can just be calm, trusting, and assume the same of others and won't be harmed by that. On the other hand, I think that a large reason why this became a major thing (there are nonspecialized flea markets and you can buy/sell bikes there too) is in large part that it's very hassle-free for sellers.
Regarding the place, Zurich has a few squares in the city center, which tend to get used for such things (I'm actually not sure how that works formally tbh). Sadly that's probably one of the larger problems with setting something like that up in the US (or am I very off?).
To give you a order of magnitude estimate, there is one such flea market organized every month Spring-Autumn in Zurich (pop. ~700k city, ~1.5M agglo) and I'd estimate that there is a bit below 1000 bikes there ~each time.
@sam I tried going to a bike shop in Missoula that only worked on expensive toys. I told them exactly what I needed - just for a pedal to be retapped - and they turned me away, "we won't touch a department store bike"
@chris__martin yah, that's pretty common; sorry you had that experience. There are problems with liability there that make a lot of shops not work on department store ones, unfortunately (most of them are designed to be ridden about 100 miles and then literally fall apart, and if the shop was the last place that touched it and then it breaks it can be a problem).
@chris__martin There's also the issue of reputation, a lot of shops get bad reviews ie. "I just wanted my shifting fixed and it's no better" because no matter what those bikes can't be fixed due to the quality of the components, so working on them can cause a lot of damage to a shop.
Not that it makes it any better that they turned you away, really sorry that happened, just to explain why it normally happens.
@chris__martin if you're looking for a place, I'd recommend seeking out a DIY bike co-op in your city. I volunteer at the one here and we work on those sorts of bikes because our mission is to help low income people who have to buy them for affordability reasons out, so we work on them a lot (whether the person is low-income or not, obviously).
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