RegularGuy

I saw Schwinns at Wally World the other day. How the mighty have fallen!

Gone are the days of "Schwinn Approved" parts. Gone are the days when a Schwinn bike could only be bought in a Schwinn shop. Gone are the days when you could be assured that a Schwinn was built by a trained mechanic and not a minimum wage earning discount store stock boy. Gone are the days when the name Schwinn stood for a certain level of quality and value.

One hundred thirty eight U.S. dollars will now buy you a heavy-framed "comfort" bike with cheap Shimano and SRAM components and Schwinn decals. The Schwinn name now means no more than Huffy, Murray, Roadmaster or (worst of all) Mongoose.

It is sad.

bikeman

How sad. I still remember the day I picked out my Schwinn Sting Ray - gold metalflake, sparkle seat and 2-speed Bendix rear hub. The perfect paper-boy bike. Purchased at a REAL Schwinn dealer for $89.00. I loved to go check out the latest bikes at the Schwinn shop as a kid. All that sparkle and chrome. A different time and place from now that's for sure.

Mass merchandising is killing the bike shops! Tell all your friends not to buy that stuff. Just because it says Schwinn it is still no better than your typical Big Box Store Huffy. Branding as they say in the advertising business is everything. They are selling to the 30 and 40-Somethings that still remember the Real Schwinns of the past. I can imagine the thought process of the guy.

"Hey kids look at this cool bike. Just like I used to ride as a kid. Let's get it. I know Schwinn quality and it is better than a Huffy and it is only $30 bucks more."

Another sucker pulled in by branding. Don't you just hate it?

RonH

I think that is really sad.
The first bike I owned as an adult was a Schwinn LeTour. Bought it in 1985 and got LOTS of great miles out of it before I gave it to my son. He has since sold it.

Another sad thing is LeMond bike accesories I've seen in Target. Most of them look really cheap. It is hard to believe anything with his name on it is sold in a lowly discount store and not a bike shop.

LittleBigMan

What's just as sad is that when I see people scooting around on a bike, too often it's one of these.

Forget that they're heavy. Forget that they rust quickly. Forget that they may throw you on your hinderparts for any number of assembly errors (like, "brakes.")

The main problem is they way they are destroying names that once meant something. This is beyond forgiveness.

I have to stop now. I'm talking myself into a depressive state.

mechBgon

This development is worst of all for the shops who actually have the word "Schwinn" in their store's name, like the first shop I worked at: Al's Schwinn Cyclery (no longer in existence as such, it was bought by Wheelsport).

I was working at a Schwinn store when the deal went down and Pacific bought Schwinn. I'd already been through the whole deal before when Mongoose began selling to Costco and then changed the bike-shop bikes to Mongoose Pro and selling standard Mongoose in the mass-merchant stores. The double-speak flew very thick from the lips of the new Mongoose rep

Anyway, it's a sad thing for many of us.

Feldman

WalMart is an evil, evil company in so many ways. Before they started to metastasize nationally there was a little bike dealers' mag called "bicycle journal" or something like that, editor/publisher's name was Quinn. Every other issue had a long diatribe against Wal Mart before many of us West Coast folks had ever even heard of them--and after the way they lied, sued, and bullied their way into my town, it could be said that Mr. Quinn was too easy on them! I will jack off into my dead mother's ashes before I spend one red cent at Wal Mart.

LegalIce

Sad...sad...sad... The first bike I remember having was a bright yellow Schwinn Sting Ray, banana seat, fat rear tire, 20 inch wheels...beats any of the BMX stuff kids ride today (IMHO )...now they have fallen to this...Schwinn used to be the standard...now they apparently have no standards left...

Redhed 

I bought a brand new beautiful Schwinn Mesa GSX model last fall and I love it. I was saddened to hear that I will have to switch to another manufacturer when I get a new one. I tested so many and it was the only one that made me happy! Now what????

In our small town, Walmart is the only grocery store and department store unless you want to drive 50 miles or more to the city. I try to buy as little as possible from them, but it is hard. When Walmart came into town all the little stores had to close their doors leaving consumers no options. Pretty soon we will have a Lowes home store and all the small hardware stores will not be able to compete and they will have to close too. It is an outrage and there is not much we can do about it.
:irritated :irritated :irritated :irritated

Feldman

If you want to see how it all got there, read a great book called "No Hands, the Rise and Fall of Schwinn Bicycle Company." Two authors, one's name is "Crowne," I think, and they both write for a Chicago business newspaper. Soap opera, history, and cycling in one--fantastic read.

webist

I suppose the truth is that some good names have been sold or gone dormant and been resuracted in another form.

My LBS says they do a good business setting up and repairing Xmart bikes. Eventually, many buy a real bike rahter than pour money into repairs on the Xmart machines.

Maybe there is some good in the fact that the Xmarts are getting people on to their first bike, weeding out those who really don't care to ride and graduating the serious ones to "college" at the LBS.

Hasn't the name Raleigh done a bit of a turn around in the past few years?


Carl

LittleBigMan

Seriously, I don't mind people selling lower-quality bikes, especially when they are priced that way. What I do mind is:
1) Using a brandname that used to mean quality to sell a low-quality bike for a higher price (how does $400 sound?);
2) Selling any bike that is not properly adjusted which can pose a hazard to the cyclist (especially kids.)

Other than that, I've ridden a Huffy on my route. It's do-able.

Wal-Mart is not the only one who needs to take a look at the danger they pose to unwitting customers. How about K-Mart and Toys-R-Us?

You could never sell a new car that had poor brakes (well, you could, but you might get sued.) Heck, even if you consider bikes as toys, the way they pull stuff off the market for causing some children to choke on small parts leads me to wonder how anyone can sell a bike (vehicle) that is not properly assembled or out of adjustment.

KennethToronto

ah, the evils of multinational big box stores

I've seen many documentaries where these stores force their way into small towns driving smaller "neighbourhood" companies to shut down. Sometimes they find the business unprofitable and close the store down - leaving towns with NOTHING and eventually killing them.

Might be the reason why I never (with the exception of my first one when I was 5) buy bikes from xmart (*Canadian tire anyone? )

diamondback

In our town they only have the schwinn accessories now, but they're all labeled with the logo Schwinn Quality. I guess a label that said 'low quaility' wouldn't sell. The average XMart customer is their to save money. So it just makes sense to park a $99 bike in your garage. The only people who are going to ride these things are kids who leave them in the driveway or on the lawn. It only hurts because we care.

Inkwolf

I used to work at a TRU, and we actually had a very good set of mechanics assembling the bikes. (Of course, they were the first ones to explain to me that all the bikes we sold were junk.) Don't know whether that's unusual or not.

As for Kmart, it seems to be dying out, slowly being strangled by Walmart.

D*Alex

About a year ago, when Schwinn 'bit the big one', I made a comment about them appearing next in Wal-Mart, with all the other cr@p bikes. somebody took offence to my comments. How ironic.

JaredMcDonley

WHen i saw it sunday after a ride of mine, i almost fell to the ground! so lady was there with her husband. they wanted "nice" bikes and the lady said told her husband that he could only get it from wal-mart, not the lbs!

Jared

John E

As the proud owner of a top-of-the-line, made-in-Greenville, destined-to-be-a-classic 1988 Schwinn mountain bike, I am offended and somewhat saddened by this final chapter in the demise of a once-great company.

Dutchy

Thanks for the laugh, I nearly choked on my lunch.

CHEERS.

Mark

Richard Cranium

The selling off of the value of American way of life didn't start at Wal-Mart -- and unfortunately there isn't any ending of this "descent into global-trade hell".

The Captains of American business in conjunction with a corrupted government have been selling out the values and dreams of Americans for years.

Why, innovate and compete for manufacturing superiority when you can farm-out the process to dicatorial regimes that enslave their populations for personal economic enrichment.

These businessmen who are so richly rewarded for "enhancing shareholder value" are the same people who couldn't trouble themselves to look into the results of their actions on the "little people" who used to make their products.

Walmart's the sympton and result of these peoples actions -- not the cause............

By the way, you should see what the GT execs did for themselves
befrore running GT into the ground ........

mike

I am reading a lot of "I'm sad to see them go, sad, sad, sad"

Well, I am sad too. I am sad that Schwinn went from making over 1,000,000 bikes per year in the 1970's to shutting down their USA factories and shipping all the work to Taiwan and China. I am sad for every American manufacturing job that is lost every day.

I know that there are forum members from other countries besides the USA, and I say to everyone' "protect your country's manufacturing jobs. Buy locally made products".

Let me tell you people, I am on the front line and can assure you that manufacturing jobs are making a mass-exodus like no other time in USA history. USA based manufacturing has been slowely trickling overseas, but it is a river now.

Manufacturing is the base of a nation's true wealth. Once the manufacturing jobs are gone, the economy will be based solely on consumerism - and that is frightening.

Don't worry, though, the economists tell us that the USA economy can be service based. Get yer burger flippers ready for your new career, folks. Sell bugers to the unemployed.

mike

It isn't always that easy, Richard. Often, the choice is to send the work overseas or go out of business. More often, it starts out slow like a bad addiction. A company starts buying parts overseas which then get assembled at the home factory. Then, it is sub-assemblies. Next thing you know, the decision is made to have the whole thing made overseas.

That is what happened to Schwinn. They started buying Shimano parts - wow, what a deal! Good AND cheap. Then, in the mid-late 1970's, they had some bikes like the Le Tour made completely in Japan. It was an excellent bike at an excellent cost.

Japanese made costs got too high, but Schwinn had the "build it overseas" fever and went to Taiwan. Of course, by that time, Schwinn was losing a lot of business to cheap imports and felt desperate to find a way to stop the hemorrage.

Copy that example and paste it to your choice of other USA manufacturers. The story is the same. Only the faces of the unemployed change.

mechBgon

Mike, I worked at a Schwinn shop at the time when they closed their last US plant, which I believe was the one in Greenville, MI. The workmanship of the bikes from Schwinn's US plants was haphazard, and my understanding was that this was costing Schwinn quite a bit to support, judging by what the shop owner had to say about the whole affair.

The Schwinn-funded Giant factory made better quality product, and made a success of themselves, eventually buying out Schwinn's stake in them. I have to give them credit for that.

fubar5

Suprise! Suprise!!

RiPHRaPH

you guys crack me up. let's see if i get this straight now. are you saying that Wal*Mart went to these manufacturers and said "you need to make cheaper, low quality stuff so we can sell it to unsuspecting people" or that it is the big box guys fault that you can hear a mom say to her son 'what color do you want?'

cause and effect. cause and effect.

obviously there is a market for this stuff.....remember-the Yugo was sold in the usa for a while.

ViciousCycle

A common scenario:
Person buys shoddy bike from big-box discounter because "the price is right."
Person finds riding the shoddy bike to be uncomfortable and/or unpleasant.
Person ends up not cycling much at all, thinking "cycling is not for them."

Eight years ago, before I find my adult passion for cyling, a family member gave me a shoddy bicycle that they had won from a big-box retailer. The seat was so uncomfortable that it was worse than a hemmroids. The frame wasn't sized for me, so my knees ached when I rode it. The bike was assembled badly and I knew nothing then about bicycle maintenance, so things like the chain slipping off at inopportune moments made the thing seem like more trouble than it was worth. When the bike was stolen, I didn't find it worth replacing.