So I stayed late at the bike shop the other night. For the second night in a row I came home around midnight. The first night I could barely put one foot in front of the other as I tripped up the walk to the house. I had been productive. I had been industrious. Piles got smaller. Fires were put out. Laid my head down and the next thing I knew, it was 5:00AM.Got up and did it again the next day. In a fog, I wondered if I was not repeating the day over. Shit, Yesterday and Today all get mixed up when I keep the candles burning through one into the other.
Updating the evening's experience as a small town retailer of goods and services that are often underrated and berated, I have to say I came home the second night not dragging ass, but with a bit of bounce in the old dogs. Must have been the 3 Foster 25 ounce beers I walked down to 7 eleven 2 times for with the third supplied by a good friend wishing to tip a beer with me.. I was still industrious and productive, but I danced and rocked as I worked. By the 3rd beer I was absolutely ecstatic. Rocking to some Bowie or was it Zep, I priced more than a few boxes of product. A chore I really detest. Toss 75 ounces of beer down my gullet and Life is a blast for a short while.
It will be interesting to see what I wrote on the price tags besides the price. I definitely stepped outside the normal retailer pricing stock box I have become trapped in these past 11 years. On the Kickstands, I seem to recall writing "Don't Buy These". Actually I did not, but I think about doing it everytime I price them.
I hate kick stands. They just give the wind a chance to ruin your day when you come out of the local A&P with some pop and there embedded in the asphalt with one pedal buried hard and the other sticking up as if trying to catch someones attention, your trusty steel steed has become part of the hot pavement. I sell Kickstands. But I don't have to like them. They inevitably fall short of the promises they make when you flick them down. So I have not hung one on any bike I owned since that first one let my brand new Huffy crash into the pavement back in the 1950s. Some lessons come early and you never forget them.
Later................
(432 / 2796)
6 comments:
Crum, you don't like kickstands? The problem in our family seems to be the opposite. The bikes that have them have good ones, and the ones without them are like the poor cousins hanging out and making the others look bad. "We really should find some kickstands for these bikes," we say, but we never do.
Crum you never thought about designing a good kickstand? Think of the PR possabilities there. Man who hates kickstands creates the ultimate. Try one of our Crummy kickstands.
Demeur has the right idea. I imagine you can't be the only anti-kickstand rider out there. And I'm in the market for a new bike, actually. Let me know the next time you have a few, I'm hoping you'll have written 1.99 on some products. ;-)
That puny piece of shit in the picture is a kick stand?
I don't think so, but it is a pencil pushers idea of one.
So how do you overcome that when everyone wants to save money?
I don't know, come up with a simple adjustable foot that they can attach to it? After all, many of these monkeys will go for anything after they have bought something stupid,
I do that all the time. :-)
I also like Demeur's idea lots: Buy Crummy brand, it's the Creme de la Crummy!
With my old bikes, it always seemed that even when I adjusted my kickstand right, the danged thing would still not work and the bike fall over. When leaving my bike, I usually leaned it up against a building or else I made sure that if it was going to fall over it wouldn't get damaged crashing into something (or that it wouldn't damage anything when it fell over). The fall-over rate was probably about 1/3 to 1/2.
I really should not be bad mouthing kick stands. I sell many of them every year. I would sell more except I often talk people out of them. A kickstand on certain bikes makes no sense and sometimes can be cause for dangerous situations. A loose kickstand can ruin a ride and leave in it's destructive wake, skin on the pavement or the rocks. Cruising around bikes(family, to the store, around the campground) - yeah they are great. But they still are undependable. They are not to be trusted.
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