Bike shops were busy during the Coronavirus outbreak as people looked for other ways to get out of the house. During the pandemic, sales at bike shops went up by more than sixty percent.
Over one hundred bikes were sold in just a few days at some stores. But the drop happened just as quickly as the rise; bike shops had trouble filling shelves after the pandemic when they ran out of bikes.
Stephen Frothingham, who is the editor-in-chief of Bicycle Retailer & Industry News, talked about the changes in bike shop sales. “For a couple of years, the industry couldn’t keep up with demand. But once the lockdowns ended, demand slowed down, and a lot of inventory started coming in,” he said.
Frothingham went on, “So for the last year and a half, the industry has had a hard time with having too much inventory at the factory level, at the distributor level, at the retail level.”
From 2022 to 2023, sales dropped by more than 20%, and experts say the drop could continue. Many people were working from home or in mixed jobs, which was a big reason why bike sales went down. This meant that fewer people had to drive to and from work.
One business owner, John McDonell of Market Street Cycles, said that every day there used to be 3,000 bikers going by, but now there are only 1,000.
He said that bigger bike shops have bought out smaller ones, which gets rid of the middleman and lets the bigger shops sell straight to customers. In the end, they put small bike shops at risk of going out of business.
