The bike industry has seen ups and down for the last 50 years and I lived through each one of them.

Things are tough today, yes, but compared to 1980/1981? Not even close, and I was working in a bike/cross country ski shop back then and saw it first-hand. In 1981 interest rate hit 18%! Yes, that's 18%. Today it's in the 5.x percent range. There were no jobs back then. Yeah, I had a job but I knew how to build and repair bikes and fit and mount bindings and repair old wooden skis too.

The questions that should be asked are:

• What is Trek prepared (or willing) to do to weather this financial storm?
• Can they find a creative solution?
• Do they have a plan with contingencies, and contingencies for the contingencies? - In other words, do they have a "Plan C"?
• How about an aggressive trade-in marketing plan and donate the trade-ins to charities and write them off their taxes? That could be done at the local level and could offset the losses on the new bikes getting purchased.

The short version is Trek has been through one of these cycles before, maybe not thing long, but they've seen this before. They need to determine what they are prepared to do if they want to survive.