Last night my brother Steve and I introduced the first of many changes, some procedural, some physical, that you’ll see at Chain Reaction this year. From the front page of our website-

NOBODY BEATS CHAIN REACTION!

• Free tune-ups on derailleurs, brakes & wheels for life on all new bike purchases. While you wait!
• 7 day low-price guarantee on all new bikes!
• Buy-back program on all new kids bikes!

There are many more reasons to buy from Chain Reaction Bicycles, including discounts on accessories when you buy your bike, our dynamic fit services (we’ll swap out the stem on your road or mountain bike anytime in the first year, not just when you buy the bike), our expert assembly, tremendous inventory and 31 years of doing business so we can honestly say we’ve done business with your parents, with you and your kids. We won’t be undersold, and we’ve never been outclassed. 2011 is going to be a great year for Chain Reaction and our customers!

What does this mean?

Free tune-ups on derailleurs, brakes & wheels for life on all new bike purchases. While you wait! It’s taken us a while to react to the “free tune-ups” being offered by some shops, believing that customers could see through it, especially as we continue to work on many bikes, paid repairs, that customers could have taken back for their “free tune up.” You can read the reviews of work performed by such shops and the truth becomes rapidly apparent, but other shops just saying they did “free tune-ups” was costing us sales. We, on the other hand, have done more “free” work on bikes we’ve sold than any such shop, handling adjustments of brakes, derailleurs and wheels on the spot, at no charge. So instead of defense and trashing other shops (never a good idea), we’re going on the offense and redefining what we do, both in words and procedure. We are confident that we are doing more for you and your bike. Always have, always will. The other guys will no longer win the battle of words though!

7 day low-price guarantee on all new bikes! If you buy a current-model bike from us and you find it in stock locally at a lower price, we will refund you the difference. We will not be undersold!

Buy-back program on all new kids bikes! This one’s pretty cool. We know that kids grow out of bikes, and we know that the bikes we sell are quite a bit better, and quite a bit more expensive, than what you find at a department store. Our bikes will typically survive several kids, while in some cases a kid has a tough time surviving a department store bike! So to make it easy to understand that you get a better bike without having to spend more, we’ll buy the bike back when the kid outgrows it. For up to 3 years, we’ll give a credit of 30% what you paid for it, less the cost of new tires if needed, towards a new bike! Obviously the bike can’t be a pile of rust, but we’ll be reasonable about normal wear & tear.

It’s going to take some time fine-tuning everything, so things will get added to this, things may change slightly, but the intention is obvious. In a bass-ackwards way, we’re backing up our deeds with words.

It’s incredibly self-serving for me to say this, but we’ve always worked hard at being the best-possible place to buy a bike… or anything else. We’ve always made the extra effort to take care of our customers when something wasn’t quite right, we’ve always tried to be as reasonable on pricing as we could, we’ve always acted like anything purchased from us was still “ours” and we were still responsible for it, years later.  But these days, that’s not enough. You have to master social media, you have to train your staff to better understand that people coming into the store aren’t “just looking” (wanting to waste time driving many miles, finding a place to park, just for fun? Don’t think so!), but want a solution to something, and it’s our job to provide that solution.

I think we’ve earned the right to sell you your next bike. Now we’re going to make sure you think so, too. Today, tomorrow, and many years from now.  –Mike–

The best plans, those where everything seems to fall into place… why are those plans the ones that most often go awry? As we look to ways to remodel our aging Redwood City store, I’ve been checking out other businesses, bike shops and otherwise, for inspiration. Yesterday afternoon I got the idea of taking the train to Burlingame to visit Summit Bicycles, because it’s only a block from the station and there were trains coming & going that would give me an hour to check things out. Perfect! Walk 10 minutes from our shop to the train station, 18 minutes on the train, an hour there, 18 minutes back… who needs a car for a quick trip?

Except that you get off the train, consult google on your iPhone, and discover you were looking at the wrong station; the station adjacent to Summit has been closed for a year and I’ve got a bit over a mile walk ahead of me. Each way. 20 minutes of the 60 spent just getting there!

Why didn’t I bring my BikeFriday on the train? Probably because I thought I was only walking 100 meters or so!

Still a productive trip; Les graciously showed me around his place, and helped continue my journey along the path that says more is not always better. In Redwood City, we have 27 models of shoes. Summit has 12. Over the years we naturally want to expand our selection to take care of anything someone might want, but along the way clutter and confusion are an unavoidable result. I’ve long had a saying that you can only show someone three different models or versions of something they’re interested in. More than that and you’re just confusing them and they’ll leave with nothing. Customers come in for solutions, not a salesperson’s ability to recite the virtues of 10 different shoes.

It’s almost as if we don’t know what’s best when we have “everything” and of course, we can’t possibly know everything about everything in the first place. Much better to have a lot of knowledge about fewer things, than a little knowledge about many.

Less stuff presented better. Wider aisles, better lines of sight (so customers can find things easier and we can find customers), fewer lines, maybe even fewer models within a line. (Becky, who handles apparel in our Redwood City store, isn’t going to like it when I explain that we can’t stock all 5 colors a jersey might come in, but only two or three.)

31 years at this and I’m still learning. It’s tough though because most every bike shop starts small and you struggle to bring in enough merchandise to have what your customers need, so as you grow, and can afford it, you naturally want… more! But what we should be doing with that 31 years of experience is to use it as a tool to zero in on what’s relevant and a good value for our customers. That will also reduce the number of times I come across something and say “We still have this???!! It was questionable when we first brought it in and now, 4 years later….”

Nothing new here, nothing I haven’t known all along if I had stopped to think about it.