The Bike Building Thread

[Department stores *sigh*]

Hey all, long time no post! I'm sure you guys know that means one of two things. Either I am out of retail or I haven't had any SC's.

Well I'm not out of retail I can tell you that. I'm still working in a big box retail store that is actually doing fairly well during this whole recession. Fortunately I haven't had any real SC's in months to even bring to your guys attention.

But now we are entering my loathed time of the year..........

Bike Building Season...

The reason I hate this duty? Well there are a few reasons...

1. I can't stand the busy busy weeks we have gotten in the past where we sell out of a particular model and we are unable to keep up production. I am usually the poor soul that is on shift during those days and what usually ends up happening is people wait for me to finish bikes to buy them since they don't want to purchase an unbuilt one. Fair enough but I hope people will not get bitchy when I take some time building one and I hope they don't start arguing who was there first.

2. The competition. We are required to write down who built what bike to keep track of how many are being built. The problem is morning merch doesn't write down how many they build. Also they are working before the store opens so they don't have any people bothering them while they build. We do. So of course they start demanding that we keep up with production and tell us we are slacking to much. Sounds fair? Of course not. It's retail.

3. The worst one by far. The smartass comments that people make when they walk by. I find this is usually the older gentlemen that shop at my store. Well, thats not true. It's very equally spread amongst everyone but I find that older men tend to have a chance to start a story after their smartass comment. Last year for example I had to listen to a 15min story about how some guy was the only kid in his small town who owned a bike and he purchased it by agreeing to milk his friends cow for four years. I was waiting for him to say he would bike uphill both ways.

Well this year I decided I will play a game.....

I am going to do my best to keep in mind the amount of smartass comments/stories I get because I'm the guy building the bikes. I'll try and keep a running tally in this post and if thats not possible I'll post at the end of the season the amount of comments I get. This way we all finally have a reference for when we complain about the amount of comments we get that people think are funny but are completely idiotic and unoriginal.

So far I have only worked 2 hours at building bikes before my days off and it was a slow day...

Smartass Comment Tally
8

Updated Feb 19/09

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

At my store we have a contractor who comes in to build our bikes for us.

This is one of my most loathed times of year at the clearance swamp. Actually, I can find things to loathe about pretty much any time of the year. Currently, it's the tidal waves of patio furniture that have been coming in. The trucks have fewer cartons on them, but they're a bitch to unload because there's so much furniture you either have to take off the conveyor belt to get it off the truck, or find someplace in the trailer to shove it off to the side.

I was hoping this year we'd have less patio furniture to deal with, what with the economy being so bad and patio furniture basically being a leisure purchase people will probably hold back on, but that isn't the case. We will have at least the same amount of patio furniture we've had in years past. Maybe even more. We had to take down an extra gondola, plus half of another one, to create the patio furniture flat. We've never had to take those gondolas down in the past.

[PepperElf]

he purchased it by agreeing to milk his friends cow for four years

not quite so ... colorful ... but my dad did buy me a second hand bike when i was growing up by trading two blue spruce saplings for it.

[Automan Empire]

OMG BIKES!!

Wow! This reminds me of my first job as a mechanic, working for Manny, Moe, and Jack. This is a large auto parts store, with an attached service and repair shop, and they also sell other things; back then it was bicycles; nowadays it is imported ATVs, etc.

At christmas time, the service department was relatively slow. So, they decided to reassign me temporarily to another store, in a rather crummy part of town. (TOWN, meaning a part of the 50-by-100 mile Los Angeles suburban sprawl. )

Seems they had some bikes to assemble. A LOT of bikes! Turns out, the manager was putting bikes on lay-away for $5. He started this before thanksgiving, and word got around, so bicycle orders increased in a logarithmic curve all the way up until Christmas. By the time they called me in, they had two other guys assembling bikes, and brought in a fourth before long. It was still bike after bike after bike, from the moment I got there tilll the moment I left.

At first, the bikes were crammed into the bicycle display area. When that was overfilled, they closed a bay in the service department and we'd wheel them out there as we finished each. Then they closed another bay. Then they brought in an 8X20 storage container. Then another container, taking a total of 4 spaces in an already-too-small parking lot. Then they closed another service bay. Finally, by a few days before Christmas, they closed the service department (VERY costly decision, between lost revenue and furloughed workers' wages.) The bikes were lined up through the WHOLE service department, in relatively neat ranks and files, but no system of arranging them by customer name or order number etc. Therefore, when someone came to claim a layaway bike, some hapless employee (never me) had to pick their way up and down the rows, looking at each ticket to find a match randomly.

Luckily, they had us bike builders stationed in the back, away from the legions of SCs. We were able to work together with a certain amount of cameraderie unavailable to the overtaxed regular workers at that store, who had to take care of the sucky throngs. The really BAD thing about it was, there was ONE speaker in the back, for the PA system, RIGHT above us, and I mean, it was LOUD. They were playing a 45 minute loop tape of christmas carols. By the fourth day, I was loudly singing my own lyrics. For example, Karen Carpenter singing Sleigh Ride, was reinvented as, "Don't hear my vomit sprinkling/when I said I was going tinkle-ing-ing/Come on, it's lovely weather to die of anorexia like me!" That kept us bike guys going for awhile, but it was too much, and the manager rebuffed our requests to turn it down, saying, "The customers like it." So... I finally found out where the PA system was, and surrepititiously put a small magnet on the casette, so the tape would pass it after the play head. Mercifully, 45 minutes later, the music burbled and went silent!

They even had me work Christmas Eve, still assembling bikes. But, there was a palpable unease from management. He had taken probably over 1,000 layaways at $5 each, which is probably more bikes than sold the rest of the year in all stores in the state! But... NOBODY was picking them up! For whatever reason, remembering that this is in a not very rich neighborhood, over 95 percent of the people just abandoned their layaways!

After Christmas, they had me doing my regular job fixing cars at my regular store. I wasn't there for the aftermath, but good news travels fast, and TBH, people were STILL talking about that debacle 2 years later, when I left that company. I have NO IDEA what they did with over 1,000 brand new, assembled bikes in January!

[dalesys]

milk his friends cow for four years

My family drank a horse when I was a teen... (9 kids at home aged 4-19)

(My dad traded our horse, Dixie, to his cousin (whose wife is named Dixie) for all the milk we drank. We'd get 10 gallons at a time from the holding tank in Tom's milking barn.)

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Automan Empire's story is a great example of why retailers won't bring back layaway despite there being demand for it.

I'll bet that store had to sell all those bicycles at a loss just to get rid of them.