"Win the Holidays", as Best Buy put it a few years ago. Really, retail has largely been gamed past the point of no return. Why manage one struggling business (your bike shop) when you can manage two struggling businesses (your bike shop and your coffee shop)! And that's why some of them tried opening coffee shops or brewing beer or hiring consultants to help them create better merchandising to "reach female buyers that like to shop" and ways to spend your money with no return. Oh yeah, bike retailers have seen their fair share of exhortations to "innovate". Sure that can work if I have a right to sales. I chuckle when people talk about the right to a job. There is a tendency for successful manufacturers to allow costs to escalate until flexibility is gone.
The economics of manufacturing: extremely multi-faceted. Cutting blanks with plasma rather than waterjet and milling steel with air blast rather than coolant, together, might make big box retail rational, for me. Business has been good, so I can afford to try new things. I looked into getting my motorcycle parts onto big corporate retail shelves, but the margins are tight. Most of my consumer products are sold directly, online, but I also sell titanium weed pipes to a local chain. I’m located just across the river from St. It’s extremely nice for me that they came back online they order out of production precision parts from me for their heavy equipment. They were not competitive with Chinese government sponsored steel, that much is true. There are steel mills down the road from my manufacturing business that were shuttered for decades and reopened when the tariffs came into effect. Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off - YMMV. But you can get products cheaper and your dollars have greater purchasing power. There are fewer local communities built around hobbies, crafts, trades, or whatever. The end result is that there is less sales tax in your community because of the absence of that brick and mortar retailer. We were a Shimano dealer, after all! If we politely refused or tried to collect a handling charge, we were the ones that would face the customer's outrage. When some of those parts customers purchased from Chain Reaction or Wiggle or whatever didn't work, the customers who bought those parts overseas would come into our shop asking us to handle the warranty process. It was a profit destroyer for us but Shimano moved units, and that's all that mattered to them.
And not only that, I found that many of those sellers would defraud customs on expensive items by declaring the value just under thresholds that would result in them paying import taxes and tariffs. ) and the effects of Shimano's inability (or really, refusal) to control pricing from its European distribution was catastrophic to my business and my peers. I owned a bike shop and sporting goods store in a past life (I've written about it here. So you're asking your local retailer to lose money to make the sale.
Some of those prices you're paying from those European outlets are less than the local retailer can buy it wholesale. MAP loopholes (like the example you mentioned) have killed brick and mortar retail.
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