(VitalNews.org) – Amid the Coronavirus pandemic bike shops found themselves booming as people looked for alternative ways to get out of the house. Bike shops saw over a sixty percent increase in sales during the time of the pandemic.
Some shops were selling over one hundred bikes within just a couple of days. However, the decline happened just as fast as the incline did; bike shops had trouble restocking shelves after they sold out during the pandemic.
Stephen Frothingham, editor-in-chief of Bicycle Retailer & Industry News spoke out on the bike shop sales fluctuation. “The industry had a hard time keeping up with the demand for a couple of years, but then demand slowed as the lockdowns ended, and then a lot of inventory started showing up,” he said.
Frothingham continued, “So now for the last year and a half, the industry has struggled with having too much inventory, at the supplier level, at the factory level, at the distributor level, at the retail level.”
Sales went down over twenty percent from 2022 to 2023 and experts say that the fluctuation could continue. One big factor that drove bike sales down was the fact that many were working from home or working hybrid positions. This meant fewer people had to commute back and forth to work.
One owner, John McDonell, owner of Market Street Cycles, said that there used to be three thousand bikers daily passing by there but now there are less than one thousand.
He stated that larger company bike shops have bought out smaller bike shops, which has cut out the middleman and allows these companies to sell directly to consumers. Ultimately they are putting independent bike shops at risk and out of business.
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