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Australian bicycle retailers are struggling to keep up with the sales boom since coronavirus restrictions took effect last month.
“We are the new toilet paper and everyone wants a piece,” Grant Kaplan, manager of Giant Sydney, a bicycle shop in Sydney’s CBD, tells Guardian Australia..
“We can’t keep up with sales. The phone is literally ringing nonstop,” he laughs, as he gets another call in the background.
Occasional employees such as Sean Marshall of Giant Sydney were initially concerned that Covid-19 restrictions would put them out of work.
But within a week of the state shutdown, Kaplan was offering his casual shifts, saying they were “understaffed given the increase in bike sales.”
The store has had to stop servicing the bikes, generally a major source of revenue, because its mechanics are overloaded with gathering new customer purchases.
Marshall, who has worked in bicycle sales for the past four years, tells Guardian Australia that he would expect to see $ 10,000 in sales on a Saturday, but for the past two weekends, “he has earned $ 40,000 each Saturday, with similar levels during the week too. “
South Melbourne bikeNOW is seeing similar figures. Co-director Nathan Ziino says they sold 40 to 45 bikes last weekend, many of which are entry-level models that cost between $ 700 and $ 1,200.
bikeNOW generally sells $ 4,000- $ 15,000 bikes to high-end customers. But Ziino says that most of the store’s recent customers have been families who want to stay active while distancing themselves socially.
“Families are tired of walking everywhere as their form of exercise. Children are at home from school or are being home schooled. If you go to a football oval and there are already many people there, you cannot continue [due to social distancing measures],” he says.
“But on your bike you are exercising and practicing social distancing.”
For others, coronavirus restrictions have finally given them time to take up a new hobby.
At Giant Sydney, Marshall says many customers have told him that they wanted to ride a bike, but that they didn’t have the time or motivation before now.
“They talk as if they were thinking about it, and now the ideal scenario has emerged: they have the time of their hands, the gyms are closed, the pools are closed, so why not buy a bicycle?”
Ziino predicts they will see a second wave of customers once the social distancing measures are eased, consisting of those who have to start traveling back to work but don’t want to risk taking public transportation.
“No one wants to be stuck on a streetcar in winter during the flu season, especially with the coronavirus,” he says.
Use of public transport in Sydney it fell about 75% in March, Transport for New South Wales reported, with the fewest people using the city’s rail, bus and ferry network in nearly a century.
Bicycle Network, Australia’s leading representative body for cyclists, has called on governments to transform roads into bicycle lanes to facilitate traffic on bicycle lanes, as has already happened in parts of Germany and California.
A two-hour count of shared roads in Melbourne found that the number of cyclists had increased by up to 79% in some areas, the Bicycle Network reported.
Meanwhile, seasoned cyclists have purchased Australia’s supply of digital “bike trainers,” devices that allow cyclists to connect their bikes to their computers and drive through virtual tracks from the comfort of their home.
Ziino says bikeNOW depleted bike trainers within two weeks of shutdown, speculating that many regular riders “can no longer put a bike in their car, park near a trail, and drive, because the police will stop them and fine them if they are far from home. “
The digital bike trend is not unique to Australia: the 104th edition of the Tour of Flanders cycling race in Belgium two weeks ago was forced to connect online, with 13 professional cyclists running the 32 km race from home using these trainers and the virtual reality application, Zwift.
Marshall was one of thousands of fans who logged on to YouTube to watch the digital avatars of cyclists run through a virtual landscape, spliced with webcam photos of their real-life counterparts strolling in their halls. to be.
The biggest problem retailers face, Kaplan says, is that they’ll soon run out of stock.
Many of the bicycles selling the Sydney Giant Bicycles are made in Taiwan and China, where factories have stopped producing for some time due to the country’s coronavirus blockade.
“It is a kind of double-edged sword: on demand and lack of supply,” he says.
