The Monday Roundup: Broke mechanics, ridiculous legislator & more

Why do bike mechanics make so little money? Because the majority of them are kids who don’t know how to fix bikes!

I may be a cranky old bastard, but I never balk about paying for service to keep my bikes smooth, silent and tight.

Simple supply and demand. The supply of people who romanticize the shop rat lifestyle and have the requisite combination of opposable thumbs and mild to moderate mechanical ability far exceeds the demand for $50 derailleur adjustments.

I mean, that’s part of the appeal of the bicycle, right? It’s so simple most people can do most basic maintenance with a few simple tools, as opposed to a modern car that can’t have a burnt-out bulb replaced without a lift and a plasma torch.

Bike mechanics: Charging more does mean you’ll lose some customers and your customer demographic will shift. But definitely charge more anyway.

Because if you assume that you have to sacrifice yourself to get a viable business, you’ll never achieve anything better than a viable business that involves sacrificing yourself. Ugh.

For a bike shop that has employees: Good wages and good benefits lead to higher quality service, more professional employee behavior, less turnover, fewer mistakes, smoother operations, happier customers.

I would LOVE to comparison shop for bike repair (and other products/services) based on whether the staff are compensated properly. If you have employees: What’s the minimum compensation package at your shop? Post it on your (physical) wall and on your website. Make it public, conspicuous, and (above all) factually correct at all times. Add a blurb that explains why it’s important to pay well.

Blame Zinn and his awesome books…

Perhaps shops could have some sort of premium service. Like a mechanic on retainer or something. I’m just thinking out loud here, but if a mechanic at a shop had a stable of I don’t know, 50 bikes and owners who were willing to shell out an annual premium, then these owners could rely on premium service from a known entity and all the perks that come with it, like an online repair log and customer relations, realtime online feedback, that type of thing. basically a team mechanic with no team. these mechanics would get paid the big bucks to work on the VIP client’s bikes. If 50 riders paid $250 a year, they could pay the mechanic an extra 10k and pocket 2500. If I raced with any regularity and started to get good results, i’d consider $250 a marginal gain worth paying.

That article about commute times and happiness rings true with me. I moved out of Beaverton (20 minute commute/direction) the summer of 2012. Now I’m in outer Washington County (60-90+ minute commute/direction), and my commute is on the bus. I can’t afford not to live where I am, but I hate my commute. I can’t wait to finish school, and get out of here.

“The speed limit for snowmobiles at night is 55 mph.”

Wow, Natural Selection at its finest!

Has that teen been arrested and charged yet for having his classmates killed?

Mechanics are broke because bike shops aren’t paying them. Bike shops aren’t paying mechanics because they think they don’t have to.

“You’re expendable”, a store owner once told me. At that time I had the lowest repair return rate of any mechanic on staff in his store, but he had no idea what that meant and he really didn’t know what a tuneup was or why it took longer than 10 minutes to build a quality wheel. He had never worked in a bike shop prior to buying himself a job in one. Shop owners know that the average customer doesn’t really care how experienced a mechanic is. The kid with the UBI certification will start at minimum wage and he’ll be happy to take your place.

Store owners also tend to be markedly stupid when it comes to labor rates and service structure: Free Tune-Ups with your bike purchase! Good luck ever making a living as a mechanic at a store that offers free “tune-ups”. Other mistakes include: discounting labor during the peak season, keeping the newbie kid mechanic on staff – even after he’s caused injuries, giving free labor to amateur bike racers (commonly mistaken for “advertising”), and never ever raising your labor rates.

That last one is outright crippling, right in there with free tunes. If a shop isn’t keeping up with inflation rates, something’s gonna give. The busiest labor schedule I ever experienced was in a shop that was charging the same labor rates it had used since opening more than a decade earlier. Owner was a really really nice, but foolish man. He had employees who had to resort to dumpster-diving to make ends meet and he was not getting the message. He eventually sold the place for almost nothing and the new owner immediately began to stair-step the labor rates. The schedule stayed full and everybody got raises.

I guess the short answer to the question “Why are bike mechanics so underpaid?” is that bike shop owners place so little value on our skilled labor.

It would be an interesting article to research the bike mechanic pay in Portland specifically. How many are career mechanics? UBI graduates? How many really are HS students looking for minimum wage?

A pretty common refrain against raising the minimum wage is that the only people making it are HS students working at McDonalds. That isn’t true for McDonalds and it probably isn’t true in Portland bike shops (see post #1 above).

I’ve used at least six different shops in Portland and have never had a “kid” work on my bike. I must be lucky. In fact, I’ve never seen a teen working at a shop. Ever.

I worked full time in a bike shop for nearly two decades.
I had no illusions that it would ever garner me enough money to save for retirement or afford health insurance. I was still relatively young (30) when I started, single and reasonable healthy.

Twenty years later, and a year and a half since leaving the bicycle industry, I have few regrets. I learned a lot, accomplished a lot, met some really good people along the way — and got out just as my knowledge base was proving too archaic for the current crop of whiz-bang, overpriced and un-durable technologies that are littering bike shops everywhere.

Hardly anyone today cares that I can overhaul a Sturmey 3- or 5- speed hub, or overhaul a coaster brake hub. Few shop owners today would justify paying me to do the labor on those more intensive repairs. They would instead urge me to persuade the customer to “upgrade” to more “modern technologies” with their more cost-effective throw-aay components.

I had a good time. I made near peanuts. I don’t have enough saved to retire on, but I hesitate to say that my two decades in the bike industry were a waste of time, and not a career. I certainly did have a career, just not an especially lucrative one. Life is short. I chose to do what moved my passions. now I have moved on to other passions and other projects. I have no regrets about the choices I’ve made, even if I end up in the 21st-century equivalent of the poorhouse.

I worked in bike shops from age 18 to 33. Then went into the medical field, realizing that wrenching on bikes was limiting my earning potential. By then I was highly skilled and fast with builds and repairs and I really liked the job. All my bike skills went in a box, so I could earn enough to buy a house and get some retirement $, although I have kept up my skills to an extent, and have done some framebuilding too.

It’s unfortunate that the profession tends to shed the most advanced mechanics; the ones you hope that will work on your bike.