Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Commuters seem to have lost their enthusiasm for being squished into a poorly ventilated box with suspiciously unhealthy looking fellow strangers. The resulting rush for healthier alternatives has triggered an ongoing global bike shortage.

Bike Shortages Aren’t Going Away Anytime Soon—Here’s Why

Robert AnnisSat,
November 7, 2020, 6:02 AM GMT+10

At a makeshift counter outside The Bike Line, an independent bike shop in Indianapolis, employees regularly help a steady stream of customers looking to buy a new bike or replace the rusty chain on the an old ten-speed that’s been gathering dust in a garage for years.

In a normal year, these requests would be quickly handled. But, as we all know, 2020 is not a normal year. Inside The Bike Line, showroom floors once packed with shiny, new bicycles are now nearly bare. The repair area is packed with bikes, waiting for back-ordered parts to arrive.

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The Bike Line has been feeling the pressure to keep up with demand. With sales more than doubling, they are still mostly unable to keep the store stocked with new bikes. Although primarily a Trek dealer, The Bike Line’s inventory was so low this summer, they needed to find alternative means of getting bikes. They eventually bought the entire inventory of Linus cruiser bikes—a brand that they typically don’t carry—from a dealer that went out of business just before the pandemic. Those bikes were gone in fewer than six weeks.

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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/bike-shortages-aren-t-going-200200926.html

It will be interesting to see whether this enthusiasm for bicycles survives the winter; riding a bike through snow can be a challenging experience. In the meantime, if anyone has a machine shop tooled up with can satisfy this raging demand for all things bike, I doubt you will get a better opportunity than now to test your product range.

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