Yes, a fickle and fad crazed buying public can sway the tides of profits for a company, but only if conditions and situations leading up to it aren't acknowledged and addressed. Not just the bicycling industry in America, but other powerful and established giants in their industry have gone the way of bankruptcy and sell off. ie. Polaroid, Digital, Compaq, Kodak, RCA, Pan Am, Pullman Standard, etc.
In most of these cases, it wasn't solely foreign competition, but simply poor business decisions.
To blame Schwinn's demise on outside factors is to forget the rising success of another American upstart company in the 70s, Trek. They are a major player in the world stage. I believe they've made some good moves to stay competitive throughout the years.

Cannondale can also be placed in there, but they eventually failed. Even though their product was highly popular and successful, so you can't blame a fickle and trend obsessed consumer market. I'd like to add that I firmly believe Cannondale's turning point was when the founder and son ventured into the moto-cross motorcycle market. A well-established, competitive, and capital intensive industry. Their failed folly drained the healthy company's financial resources. A sad loss IMO of an American Cycling icon. More so than Schwinn. Cannondale was an innovator, in the face of tradition (old American cycling image and the European mindset).

Schwinn as a brand, was not even on my RADAR screen back in the 70s. In the Northeast (NY), other brands were more prevalent...Ross, Huffy, Sears. Raleigh and Peugeot were the heavy foreign hitters. Fuji entered with a lot of success late in the decade.
It wasn't until joining BF's C&V that I learned of the company's colorful history and range of products...the good, bad, and ugly. I wasn't aware of any 'good'. ;)

Paramounts .

I have a Columbia mixte that has no rust, though I was told by the guy that sold it to me that the bike was always garaged by the original owner. I haven't looked up the year yet, but really should. It is in remarkable condition. I had planned to convert it to an IGH, but may sell it instead.

I've also done lots of different jobs over the years. There are times when I actually wish I had a mind-numbing factory job instead of doing the work I do. It would probably be better than dealing with horrible management that creates hostile work environments and dealing with people being unfairly suspended and terminated. Yes, I am a full-time union representative. Don't worry I've put my flame ******ant suit on. ;)

Trek in the 70s was a niche manufacturer, they didn't even actually make bicycles until the close of the decade.

Obviously a company like Schwinn wasn't going to go "ok we'll give up 99% of our business, fire most of our workforce, and focus on the Paramount line". Although it's likely they'd still be around if they had, it wasn't really an option for them. They could have however closed the Chicago factory half a decade earlier, and not wasted money on a factory in Hungary... perhaps picked up on BMX faster, and given a more serious effort to mountain biking.

It's kind of interesting though comparing the different strategies of the American bike companies as they all headed into oblivion.

Columbia was essentially dead in the water once MTD bought them. MTD so far as I can tell had absolutely no appreciation for bicycles. They made lawnmowers and snowblowers. I guess they wanted to try and "me too" with Murray, so they acquired an established brand with their own factory that could get them into the bike business. They didn't care though obviously - any bike was good enough for them - so that's what they made. Hey if it had pedals and two wheels it was a bike right?

Ross was a new company formed after WWII. They had a greater incentive to survive being neither able to rest on their laurels or owned by a larger company. They also didn't have to deal with an antique factory so they adopted up to date manufacturing techniques. They started at the bottom end of the market and moved progressively upwards. They even were in the custom frame building business for a while - but the bulk of their business was always going to be department store stuff, which ultimately wasn't going to be sustainable once product from non-capitalist economies started rolling in. They were quick to catch on to mountain bikes, and they were also the first U.S. company to offer lugged frames on most of their models back when people saw lugged frames as an indication of quality.

Murray was always a cheap brand. I don't really know much about Murray, but I heard that they shot themselves in the foot when they started making store brand bicycles for the likes of K-mart. Bike shops resented them competing with their own self branded products so they stopped stocking Murray bikes. Being at the bottom of the market they ran into the same eventual problem that Huffy and AMF faced.

Rollfast was an odd case. Rollfast and Hawthorne bikes were made by D.P. Harris/Snyder, and it seems that somewhere along the line Stelber/Iverson got rolled into the mix too. About 1974/1975 Mossberg (firearms) bought out the company and all of these brands disappeared. AMF supplied "Rollfast" bikes for a short period of time, but these were deemed too shoddy by the distributor so even the Rollfast brand died. Or so is my understanding, there's very little straightforward information about this.

I have seen Mossberg bikes that are identical to the Rollfast products, but they are uncommon. I've also seen an AMF rollfast before. Mossberg ended up making some very expensive bicycles that had nothing in common with the bikes Rollfast had been making, so the buyout seems to have been rather pointless and destructive so far as I can reason.

Compared to pulling lumber on the green chain, or palleting crates of food cans it must be a godsend. (I've done both.)

I've been a lumber man myself, and have no idea what the green chain refers to.

The green chain is where men sort timber manually which is a job that is now pretty much automated.

My grandfather and step father worked together in lumber camps... it was pretty brutal work and they were both brutes in the sense they could outwork anyone and my grandfather said he had never met anyone stronger than my step father. I once saw him lift and toss a full oil drum like it was nothing and well into his seventies my grandfather could dead lift 500 pounds.

My grandfather told me he used to load railway ties in boxcars after the depression and he was paid $2.00 per boxcar and could load 2 of these a day... when he went to collect his day's pay the paymaster said he was going to fire him for lying about how much work he had done and falsifying the work slips... because nobody could load two boxcars a day.

The foreman had to step in and tell the paymaster that my grandfather, (who would have been in his early thirties) was loading up two boxcars a day and that he could not believe it either.

He had a farm, a wife, and 4 children and times were really tough so that extra $4.00 a day meant a lot... he thought the paymaster was trying to cheat him and said he was lucky the foreman stepped in to clear things up or he may have had to toss him around like a railway tie.

In many ways technology has improved a lot of things... a lot of work used to be hard and dangerous and now lots of that has been replaced by machines.

The most mind numbing job I have ever done was run the drill press in the shop when we had batches of hydro brake rotors that needed to be drilled... but it was a hell of a workout as these weighed 120 pounds each and needed to be manually loaded and aligned in the jig and then stacked on pallets. Once they were drilled you could use the overhead crane to lift them off and use this to assist with the stacking.

+1.

Demanding high wages for bike builders was financially unsustainable. A worker that ended up with no job because of this demand is kinda worse off than having the job at a modest wage. I am sure that someone has another side of the story to tell.

Anyhow - great commercial. I liked the shot of the DeSoto factory at the end. Took my initial driver's exam in a DeSoto.

-gmt

I think people forget that the Schwinn's non-UAW factory in Mississippi also didn't do too well either. The Union was only one small problem amongst many larger issues. Also by the time the UAW was actually involved with Schwinn, in 1980 IIRC, the company was already a long ways down the wrong path. They ought to have modernized or ditched the Chicago plant at least half a decade before that time.

If Schwinn's problems were a haystack, unions were a needle. They also had to contend with souring relations with Giant when they tried to get an agreement with China Bicycle Company - an agreement that didn't work out anyway. Edward Schwinn firing management he didn't like even though they were doing good, etc.

But I think the biggest isssue was still that they were taking too long to respond to trends, and they had a lot of capital tied up in the chicago plant - on antiquated machinery that was used to make heavy bikes that the market didn't want.

Funny, I'd rather thank you for the necessary work you do . Thank You, Photogravity.

Still like the smell of creosote, reminds me of my youth . I loved railroad work until I had a heatstroke . Our railroad still did everything by hand, with 8 pound sledgehammers and lining bars . Good times . My Dad worked in a steel mill , drawing wire until he was 62. But he loved the people and the work, and had a million stories about the mill.

Off topic but here goes: The lumber and or dimensional timber (the chain I was on) comes off the pony saw in the head of the mill. Timber goes to one table, lumber to another. It is dropped onto the correct sorting table by a dude who knows what he is doing. It's moves on two chains either side of the table to two guys operating trim saws. They trim up the ends on either side. Then a grader quickly studies and grades the piece. Another dude has the single job of recording the stock. Now it's up to the green chain guys to "pull" the timber off the chain and place it on the right pile for that respective grade and rough dimension.

I worked in an old mill. Lots of accidents had happened over the years before WCB sort of kicked in stricter rules. There were a few guys around the place who were missing pieces of themselves from crushing and cutting. Being a millwright was not much safer. And hearing loss was an occupational hazard. I was almost killed one night when a couple of tons of lumber toppled. (I dove when I caught a moving shadow in the corner of my eye.) Only months before I got there, the straight chain was replaced with one that had rollers to help in the process of pulling off the heavy timber. Often these huge timbers were 20 feet long or more. At the time, I knew that I was watching some of the last virgin red cedar forest that was ever going to be milled. Most of it went to Europe. I was under age, but I went to to the beer hall with all the others and drank my share of beer after a shift — a schooner was 20 cents! A working guy could still afford his beer. We got off at midnight, and all the glasses had to be off table by 1:00. The waiters were fairly running! That Canada has gone.

Not arguing semantics, but as a matter of practical understanding of manufacturing and of US legal definitions, no they don't. They manufacture bicycle frames, and assemble bicycles using those frames and imported components. This really isn't all that unique; there are many other niche companies which also do this.

Worksman does a fair amount of flag waving on their web site, but they are careful - and clever - to never make the (illegal) claim that their bicycles are "Made in USA".

Well then most U.S.A. made bicycles haven't actually been "made in the U.S.A." since the 1960s or maybe even earlier...

I would have to concur with what you're saying Mos6502. The union was not the problem with Schwinn, but they did receive a lot of blame for Schwinn's failures. It really came down to management being out of lockstep with the changing taste of the buying public. It is easy to point fingers at unions and think that they are the root of the problem, but without them, we'd not have 8 hour workdays, 5 day workweeks and equitable pay, just to name a few things that unions have done for workers. It is a shame things that many take for granted were because of unions but are now forgotten by the public at large.

GA, thank you. Much of what I do is thankless, but a sincere thanks once in a while means a lot. :)

GA, it's funny you mention the smell of creosote as I also like that scent. Where I grew up, I lived near the Penn Line outside of Baltimore MD and the railroad tracks were my playground as a kid. When the maintenance crews would come into town, the sleeping cars and kitchen facilities were parked on the sidetrack just a little way from my house. I would talk to them and hang out with them as much as I could and they got so accustomed to my presence, they started feeding me too. I remember just how kind those guys were and still wonder what ever happened to many of those men. It's been 30 or more years ago and I'm sure many of them are long since retired or have passed on...

Thanks for bringing back some memories for me. I like to get nostalgic now and again. :)

I was a trim sawyer for two years. It wasn't so bad in the summer but in the winter it quickly gets brutal, the green lumber comes in from rough-saw bundled and not stickered and the boards freeze together so you essentially have to knock apart a 40x40x120-inch block of wood board by board. When the crew is getting paid by the board foot, it sucks to be the guy that's holding up everybody's pay. I was eating my head off the second winter and still losing over a pound a day. The only work i've done that's physically harder is building barge tow on the Lower Mississippi in a Louisiana summer.

Neither of these industries is unionized, and wages are commensurrately low. At least with the deckhand work I knew every day i worked was one more day of sea-time toward sitting for my Master's Papers.

I had one Rollfast branded bike, a Sting Ray knockoff that was sold by the non-Schwinn LBS. It was of good quality, definitely above the Huffy and Murray bikes of the day (this was made in about 1967). Prior to that I had a mid sixties Hawthorne (Wards) Rollfast 24" kids bike. It was nice but had the world's worst coaster brake, can't remember the brand but it was Japanese and would not stop the bike.

I always wondered what happened to Rollfast....

Careful,... this is a family website. :innocent:

Love it !

I loved the video and many comments on this thread. Thank you, folks and especially Sixty Fiver.

Did you notice the short clip of the two people riding bikes? One of them smoked a cigarette!

Because it was the healthy thing to do . Aids in the digestion of your victuals

I would agree that the union had nearly nothing to do with Schwinn's demise. Ed Schwinn caused Schwinn's demise, pretty much. It is quite common for the third-generation family members to run an iconic company into the ground, unfortunately. Fortunately, Richard got Waterford (which really wasn't much, at that point, but it was better than nothing...).

When you shift something like 97% of your production to Taiwan, show them the technology to make quality bicycles, build them up to be a significant business, and get no kind of subsidiary, partial-ownership, or non-compete (or other business-protecting) agreement, you're doomed. It's just a matter of time. One day, Giant mgmt. said "we're going to sell our bikes directly to US consumers.' Schwinn was toast from that point forward. They had no possible answer to Giant cutting out the middle man. How could they?

Crain's Chicago Business ran a great multi-issue story about the fall of Schwinn. Riveting reading, imo.