Business is booming for bike shops in the Verde Valley, but a national shortage of bikes and bike parts has them riding a gnarly line.
But the ride could be epic if bike and parts manufacturers can deliver on promises to bring more bikes to the market later this month and early fall.
For many Verde Valley bike shops, 2020 has been a record year. Shop managers said that with gyms and recreation centers closed for parts of the spring and summer, people in the Verde Valley and across the country started looking to bike riding for exercise. This led people to seek out new bikes or bring in old bikes for repair.
But with growing lists of bikes on backorder and stretched rental bike fleets, shops need more of the human-powered machines to continue on their championship pace.
The prelude to the current shortage occurred in April and May, when retailers saw an unprecedented surge in bike purchasing.
Alex Petitdemange, service manager at Absolute Bikes Sedona, said that in the spring the shop sold a year’s worth of bikes in two months.
“In April and May, even without doing any rentals, we had the highest sales numbers ever, really. Same in Flagstaff,” he said.
To meet the sudden demand for bikes during the shutdown, some local shops started selling off rental bikes, assuming the rental fleet could be replaced later when normal business resumed.
“After a little while, mid-May, we start figuring out that we couldn’t really order new bikes …. It started to be complicated to get new bikes,” Petitdemange said. “So then we slowed down on selling what we had, because we start realizing we might not be able to replace it if we need to rent again.”
By mid-June, he said, new bikes from manufacturers were “completely unavailable.” After bikes were wiped out, parts started to get wiped out, too. Deliveries of tubes, tires and shifters slowed to a trickle.
Randy Young, manager of Verde Valley Bicycle Co. in Cottonwood, said he normally has two or three bikes on backorder, but right now has 86.
A byproduct of the shortage was a heat up in the used-bike market. Petitdemange said he sold two used bikes he owned for “full dollar.” He’s holding on to his last bike because it would be hard to replace.
Shops have an incentive to sell whatever stock is available, but since the bike rental market also took off after the initial shutdown ended, shops need to hold some bikes if they want to keep the rental business going.
“It’s the best rental year we’ve had in four or five years,” Jeremy West, a bike mechanic with Bike & Bean in the Village of Oak Creek, said. “People are literally riding out the pandemic.”
The bike shortage adds an edge of anxiety to the joy of biking’s boom in the coronavirus era, but Young thinks there will be long-term benefits to the current surge in interest.
He said a lot of his customers this spring and summer were first-time buyers needing an alternative way to exercise. Young believes that people will return to the gyms once they can open safely, but he also thinks many will continue riding, especially considering the Verde Valley has become a great mountain biking location.
“I think people are enjoying [bike riding] … I think people will stay on it,” Young said. “I think it’s created a lot of cyclists.”
