This is a pic of the Walmart bike aisle taken the other day.
I keep hustlin’ and trying to figure out how to keep my nose above water as I go. I remember looking down this aisle 4 months ago and it was empty. That made me so happy. For one, there weren’t any bull**** crappy Walmart bikes in circulation and second, that meant people were going keep buying from the underground. But honestly, that picture, of all those crappy bikes lined up on racks in an aisle at Walmart, has me worried. I knew it was going to happen.... It makes me feel like I need a game plan. I need to shift my mentality and focus on a different approach. Something I’ve been meaning to do and maybe NOW is the time. I need to sell more online. I need to find a way to push bike repair. Bike shops are backed up with people needing bike repairs. The turnaround is like 2 weeks minimum. That’s a long time to have to wait for your bike to get fixed. It’s also going to cost an arm and a leg. I have a website I traded a bike for. It’s pretty sweet. On it I have a list of all bike repair prices. I’ve been so caught up in my personal life and I’m getting distracted. I wake up without my family and I’m alone and I get depressed and I lay there for hours. Theres so much I need to be doing. I don’t know where to start. I have a couple of places that let me set up shop for the day. I call it a Bikeshop PopUp. I advertise for it on Marketplace and Offerup and I take all my bikes there and tell people to stop by and they can test ride my bikes and I have a lot of parts for sale. I need to setup another one and focus on mentioning bike repair. Ive had an excuse to slow down, but not a good enough reason to stop. The last one I did I came home tired and after all the loading and unloading I was ready for bed. I left a footlocker that I keep a lot of my carbon fiber parts in inside my truck in the backseat. I also had a set of expensive dish fixie rims back there. I guess I forgot to lock my truck or something because I was so tired. But yeah, I woke up in a great mood and was going to go on a bike ride and when I walked outside I looked at my truck and the door was wide open. All my stuff was gone. About 800 bucks in nice bike parts. Bullhorn and drop handle bars, carbon fiber stem and seatposts. Track fixie saddles and that nice Origin 8 dish 700c rimset. For a guy like me trying to make it selling bikes and bike parts, it was like taking 2 steps back. It took having a lot of bikes to get all those nice parts. I’m still losing sleep from it. Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up and look out the window in the living room to see if I spot someone looking into my truck. I don’t trust anyone on the block now. Everyone is a suspect to me. I think someone saw me loading up all my bikes and parts for my PopUp. Like I’ve been targeted. I changed the locks to my doors in my house. I’m paranoid now. It’s been very discouraging and sometimes I want to throw in the towel. Only problem is that I’m a Chef by trade and the market sucks. Not only that but Covid is getting bad again. People are acting like things aren’t as bad as they are. I work part time, 2 days a week, and I see people walking into the restaurant with their masks on, all in groups, and they sit down shoulder to shoulder and take them off. I feel like It’s no wonder why things are they way they are. ****s going to hit the fan again. Being a Chef during these times just really sucks. People can’t pay me what I’m worth because they just aren’t making a lot of money and I understand that. I’m not going to take 10 bucks an hour and spend all my time at a place wearing a mask for a crappy paycheck. I am too old for this and I feel like bikes are my escape plan for getting out of the restaurant industry. What really sucks is that I was fine before Covid hit. My checks were good. I was running things and doing a good job. I had my family. Everything was getting paid. Working 72 hours a week was tough but I couldn’t complain. And then.... the restaurant shut down. We had a meeting and I told everyone that it was just for a couple of weeks. So we cleaned up and made use of all the food we had on hand. I took a bunch of stuff home and went into Quarantine with my family. Weeks went by and my relationship with my wife was going downhill. We weren’t use to being around each other so much. I’m a narcissist and she’s very headstrong and we’re both stubborn. The bikes made everything worse. I was using my stimulus money on bikes and she was starting to complain. I saw bikes as money in the bank and an investment for the future. I couldn’t just keep spending that money until it disappeared. Then what were we going to do? I had mouths to feed. Bills to pay. I had to make money with the money I had....
But anyways, I’m ranting and going on and I’m pretty sure you guys have already heard it. I know I’m not the only one. Covid hit everyone hard. I think everything happens for a reason. I feel like this is my shot at starting my own business. I want to start doing private dinners at my house. I also have a food website that came with my trade deal. It was an 900 dollar bike I traded for 2 websites. Cool thing is that I got the bike I traded the sites for 300 bucks. So now I have these 2 very professional websites and they are sitting there because I’m too depressed and because my motivation is almost out of steam. Mercari is a pretty cool app and I have a friend that sells his BMX stuff there. eBay is something I need to look into. Bike repairs and pushing my website need to be priority. I use my PopUps as motivation to get my bikes in good working condition to sell. Only thing with that is that I have so many bikes and they all need a little something done to them. I spend a lot of time doing my own repairs and the days are just flying by. I spend my free time working on bikes and not on marketing. I just need to go to a coffee shop with my laptop and brainstorm and not leave til I have a solid game plan because Walmart is stocked up and winter is right around the corner. I feel like through writing this post I’m waking up a little. Depression is hard to shake off but I need to just splash some cold water on my face. Today at 3:00 I’m going to trade my State Megalith fat tire bike for about an 800 dollar 21” BMX build. What’s cool is that I got the fat tire bike for 200 bucks. It’s msrp is about 800 bucks and it has a Thomson seatpost and Ritchey handlebars. It’s cool and all but not really my thing. I bought it knowing it would be great to barter with. The guy I’m trading with is someone I met on Offerup. He’s also a Chef and the guy that sells a lot on Mercari. I’m going to talk to him about how he ships his stuff he sells. It seems like such a pain in the ass to ship but it’s something I need to start getting used to. If I can use this opportunity to get my motivation back and a new game plan going I’ll be good. I think I’m going to go on a bike ride now. One last cruise to the coffeehouse on the Megalith before he’s gone. I hope everyone is doing fine out there and sorry if my story was too long. I didn’t mean to go this far with this post, but like I said, I believe everything happens for a reason. For my website I thought of these cool words for bike riders to live by. Now that I think of it, I need to start living it myself. There are subtle underlying messages behind it too. it’s about us all coming together but waking up too. About riding your bike not softly and shredding. It’s also about working hard and grinding on but also with BMX you can grind on your bike. It might not look like much, I don’t know, but after I finally wrote it to where it looked good to my eyes, to where it FELT good, I sat back in my chair, kicked my feet up on the desk, put me hands behind my head and smiled. Here it is. Have a good day y’all.
Rise up
Ride hard.
Grind on...
AF Cycles Tx.