The Bikesmith, Seattle, shutting down

In rec.bicycles.tech David Kerber wrote:
In article ,

http://www.tricell-ent.com/Shakti.htm

I think if I knocked off 60 or 70 IQ points I might be persuaded it was
a good idea.

I would hope it would take more than that!

Heh, well I figure with a sub 90 IQ I might be more biddable. But given
how stubborn I can be, I hope it would still be hard. ;-D

--
Dane Jackson - z u v e m b i @ u n i x b i g o t s . o r g
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets
people's attention.

In article Y2RQb.18004$U%5.123612@attbi_s03,
"Claire Petersky" writes:

"Tom Keats" wrote in message
...
I'd rather grow my own veggies, and in fact, this
year, I'm gonna!

Warning, the growing of vegetables may interfere with full enjoyment of the
bicycling season.

Well, I've gotta anyway. I've gotten myself indentured to
do a bunch of planting at my brother's ranchette this spring,
as well a job working on an echinacea farm near there -- it'll
be about a 10 km one-way commute, I figure. My brother's cash
crops will include fancy garlic, silverskin pickling onions,
and sweet potatoes. He's trying to phase out the beef raising
aspect of the biz.

So, I might as well take over the household vegetable patch
while I'm at it. I can never find decent beet tops (my all
time fave vegetable) in town here, but at least I'll get to
grow some.

In many ways I'm going to hate leaving the city. I'll just
have to make the most of it.


cheers,
Tom

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Above address is just a spam midden.
I'm really at: tkeats [curlicue] vcn [point] bc [point] ca

On 28 Jan 2004 18:19:46 GMT, David Reuteler wrote:

say, i'm guessing this wasn't your fault?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movi....ap/index.html

naw, i could't even see it, heard it though.
from what a did see though that girl ain't too aware of what's going
on in the space around her, just about got clipped a couple of times
by the aerial acrobats earlier.
and it weren't no mic boom either it was a 10' piece of box truss
hinged to swing about 20' with a 102lb moving light stuck onto the end
of it. coulda kilt 'er easy.
only in the movies would it seem like a good idea to put a moving
light on a swinging truss to reproduce what it looks like back stage
in a theatre...

28 Jan 2004 18:19:46 GMT,
,
David Reuteler wrote:

say, i'm guessing this wasn't your fault?

". . .spent six hours in a hospital waiting room"

No, I don't think Gordon Cambell posts here any more since he got his
driver's license back.

*Leader of the ruling jack-boot liberal party's 'privatisation'
scheme. He was busted DUI on last year's Hawaiian vacation.
--
zk

i'm trying to visualize flower carts in madison in january.

yesterday i was checking accuweather to see if it was going to snow later
in the week .. i punched in my zipcode 83702 and nearly died. 9F high on
saturday, lows in the -6F range. dear god, i felt my heart in my throat.
i'm used to 33F low and mid 40F highs.

i had, of course, punched in 53702. madison, wi.

Yes, but I imagine they last much longer without wilting in such cold
weather!

--Mike-- Chain Reaction Bicycles
http://www.ChainReactionBicycles.com

David Reuteler wrote:
In rec.bicycles.misc A Muzi wrote:
: It's nice to have flowers and it's cheap in season, $3 to $6
: a week. I bike right past all the flower carts anyway.

David Reuteler wrote:
i'm trying to visualize flower carts in madison in january.
yesterday i was checking accuweather to see if it was going to snow later
in the week .. i punched in my zipcode 83702 and nearly died. 9F high on
saturday, lows in the -6F range. dear god, i felt my heart in my throat.
i'm used to 33F low and mid 40F highs.

i had, of course, punched in 53702. madison, wi.

Right. There sure are no flower carts here in January.

The NYTimes today had a front page picture of some poor
woman walking alone in the snow in Norilsk Siberia. It's
more like that.

Today riding to the Post Office the salt was crusty slush
instead of a slurry.

Here, flowers in spring have meaning.
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

BB wrote:
Its possible that you two are talking about different things. The
apparently low-end bikes I rode in Europe were more like the "city bikes"
that Breezer sells. I never saw anything in Europe like the crap they sell
in U.S. discount stores -

This is true on the Continent, but (alas) in the UK we get plenty of
100-quid gaspipe clunkers and very few good utility bikes.
--
David Damerell flcl?

Moore's Law may be going wild. I stopped by
WalMart this evening. The $64.77 bike is now
down to $53.73, or the equivalent of five of
their $11 gimme caps with football-team logos.

Carl Fogel

Carl: You've certainly demonstrated that the bike is cheap! But my other
points remain-

#1: The bikes are anything but standardized. If something breaks or needs
repair, the costs of doing so may easily exceed the cost of the bike. I
suppose this renders the bike "disposable", but in a good sense???

#2: The bike is offered without any support, assembly is questionable at
best, and if a car was done similarly (or even remotely like it) people
would not see it as a viable transportation vehicle. Yet you propose the
"disposable" bike is. I think not, at least not for most people. It
remains a BSO (bike shaped object) of limited utility, whose main function
is to discourage people from believing that bikes are efficient, practical &
fun ways to get around.

Someday, we may see a simplified bike design that requires almost no
assembly or adjustment, and bikes will legitimately be divided between cheap
methods of transportation and high-performance recreational/sport machines.
But that day is *not* now. The cheap bikes do everything they can to
emulate the look of their more-expensive (and far more functional) brethren,
to their detriment.

Right now, cheapie bikes are all about marketing, and have absolutely
nothing whatsoever to do with function (with the exception of trying to
avoid legal entanglements from being too dangerous). The irony here is that
that's the same rap with give the machines we love to ride- that we're
paying a lot for vanity and glitz over function.

--Mike-- Chain Reaction Bicycles
http://www.ChainReactionBicycles.com

On 28 Jan 2004 18:19:46 GMT, David Reuteler wrote:
In rec.bicycles.tech jeffbonny wrote:
: Soleil type theatre scene in the film Catwoman starring Halle Berry
: due out late summer or so.

say, i'm guessing this wasn't your fault?
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movi....ap/index.html

Here's why Jeff might have dropped the spot from his slippery hands:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...418218.jpg&e=2

bunches-o-groups snipped

In article ,
Chalo wrote:

I certainly can't blame him if this is the case, but I have to wonder
about the virtue of a town in which some cheesy, basically worthless
bike shops can prosper but a truly helpful, expert, and well-versed
shop like Val Kleitz's can founder.

As a certified jaded ex-Seattleite, it pains me to step in and defend the
town, but it's not the town's fault. Cheesy basically worthless shops
everywhere prosper while good shops go down the tubes. I suspect the
culprit here is increasing rents along 45th Street in Wallingford.
Assuming Bikesmith's revenues haven't been increasing as fast as rents,
and I can't imagine how they could, that would be all it would take. With
the benefit of hindsight, it might have made more sense for the shop to
move to a less desirable storefront on 40th street, assuming that
something was available and could be had for a reasonable price.

It's much the same as when chain "restaurants" thrive while local
owner-operated eateries fold, or when Wal-Mart exterminates entire
small-town economies in exchange for a few percent discount on
crappified goods.

It is, and I suspect it has much to do with the fact that our economic
infrastructure is built to support big operations, not mom and pop. I'm
not particularly thrilled with that situation myself, but that seems like
an awful lot of blame to pin on Joe Bikeshopper.

--
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Eric Holeman Chicago Illinois USA