Winter timing: Bike shop opening hours and cost savings during off-season

2023 has held a few glum surprises, but we can’t claim to be shocked by the arrival of winter. What are retail expectations as we arrive in off-season? And will there be a cut in bike shop opening hours in the winter months?

It’s been a testing year for many but the traditionally quieter months of winter have always asked questions of a usually seasonal bike trade. Keeping a close eye on costs is par for the course when the clocks go back and bike shops have long used the period to take different measures to trim bills. Cutting opening hours was the topic of discussion over on the Cycling Industry Chat group on Facebook, with shops initially chatting through the topic with regards to off-season, but soon expanding the conversation to cutting working hours in general.

Since the pandemic upended conventional working hours and practices for many (at least temporarily), a broader range of sectors have experimented with 4 day weeks, home working and generally more open to enlightened flexible work practices.

Bike shops considered the wisdom of remaining open on “non-existent sales days” where staff were “twiddling their thumbs”, while others revealed that the Covid watershed had seen them reduce the days their shops remained open. Some bike shops explained how an opening hour tweak had helped them regain a better work/life balance.

Taking inspiration from the discussion, Cycling Industry News spoke with two bike shops and asked them to share their thoughts on the topic, including whether they would ever consider cutting opening hours to cut costs during the downturn and/or off season and their expectations for the coming months.

Dylan Thomas, PIM Cycles
Here at PIM Cycles we opened in 2009 when there was a small recession, so we set everything up with costs in mind. We are thinking that this winter is going to be long and slow so after 14 years we are going to be reverting back to how we set everything up. We have a great team here and we are hoping to keep them all on board but that is down to if we are able to keep the work coming in. But we are not going to change any of our opening times as we think they work really well and we can all have weekends off.

We are a workshop-only company so we do not have the problems that a lot of our friends have in having to keep bikes and accessories in stock just in case someone walks in. But we do have to keep a good stock of wheel components as we do have companies phoning up needing say 40 sets of wheels or 7000 spokes in multiple sizes in eight or nine days. Or bike companies that are having problems with their wheels and need us to help sort them out.

We are only just starting to see the signs of the slowdown but we are confident we can make it work. We have a really strong trade and non trade client base all over the UK that we have been working closely with for years so hopefully this will help.

We are quite resilient as 90% of all our work comes from around the UK not just York but looking at the figures the orders coming in are around 10% down from 2022 but we are still up from before Covid.

We are still going to hold back on buying promo and freebie stuff that we normally have to give to people just in case it lasts a little longer than the winter months. But for some reason this year feels different somehow a lot of shops are saying they are very quiet. I know of one shop that had not sold one bike all month and I know their stock levels are very high from over ordering during Covid… Another customer who owns a shop in the south told me they are down by 75% and it is just their workshop that is keeping their head just above water.

We have the same slow moments like at the start or end of holidays which is the same as other shops. But we started out in a way not to step on other people’s toes and I would like to think that because of this other shops use us and send us jobs or customers they can’t sort out in house. But we work with others around the UK to help improve cycling.

Stock availability issues? In the main, no. We have managed to keep good stock levels on spokes, nipples and rims but from time to time getting hubs people want has led to people waiting for a few extra weeks. One of our big customers who is a distributor in the UK sometimes could not wait for the lead time on big batches of spokes but that was out of our hands.

Paul Corcoran, Pennine Cycles

We’ve always dealt with the seasons in a different way but not relative to shop opening hours. Yes over recent years the prime day for being busy on a Saturday has changed. Particularly on Saturdays we were always busy with club and racing guys buying last minute purchases or needing urgent repairs for the weekend!

During Covid we decided to close on Saturdays at 5pm from 6pm first and then later to 4pm as customer shopping habits had changed and gives us a better work life blend. We have had to re-educate a few customers who were in the habit of calling in the shop late on Saturdays.

We have always closed on Sundays (as we expect all our customers and the Pennine team to be out cycling) and Mondays.

Tuesday to Friday opening hours 10 to 6 and no point in reducing hours as I’m always at the shop until late anyhow. If the lights are on I’ll always welcome customers.

We will always accommodate our customers with out of hours appointments to fit in. As an independent family business we can be flexible and are always looking at ways to reduce our running costs.

Want to have your say? Contact us at jon@cyclingindustry.news

This article first appeared in issue 6 2023 of Cycling Industry News. You can read the whole magazine in our Archive. Don’t get the magazine but want to? Head to our subscription form.