Tales from the Quality World- Big Box Store Bikes

My last article dealt with a direct quality issue in a plant working with a customer and I’ve got about another dozen of these sort of articles in the queue waiting to be written, but I’d like to diverge a little bit and discuss something that is close to my heart: bicycling, as well as quality, and production in Taiwan and China.

I’ve been involved in mountain bike advocacy since 1999, being a chapter and state president of the mountain bike association in Michigan, as well as the trail school director. I’ve also been an advocate for road safety in the Grand Rapids area, lobbying the surrounding communities outsie of Grand Rapids to adopt the same 5 ft passing rule as the city of Grand Rapids, to homogenize this rule across the metro area. Unfortunately, I was not successful with that effort and those Suburban cities pushed back and waited for the state to put their 3 foot rule into place.

Anyway, as a result of my advocacy in the early mid 2000’s, I was interviewed by the local press regarding mountain biking and the local Job Corps facility director contacted me. It seems that as part of their program, which is a residential program for job training, they also have some recreational activities for the people that live in the facility and part of this was a 15 to 20 bicycles which I was told me over the phone many were not wrideable.

So I grab my tools on a Saturday and go to the Job Corps Center recreation area and open the garage door where the bicycles were located and began to work on each bicycle, trying to get as many rideable as possible. Needless to say, the facility had a mishmash of brands and styles of bicycle and I worked my way through several of them and got a number of them rideable.

The key point of this article, in terms of quality, is to give a shout out to local bike shops and their product.

There’s two ways one can buy a bicycle, other than online of course. One is to go to a big box store like a Meijer or Walmart. Or you can go to your local bike shop. The anecdote I’m about to tell you is why I encourage you to shop first at your local bike shop.

In this stable of bicycles at the Job Corps facility were eight or nine bicycles of the brand and model Royce Union. Now at a glance all of these bicycles were the same bike-same make and model. But as I struggled to make a number of them rideable, I ran into several different roadblocks- and this is where Chinese or Taiwanese production comes into play.

The department/big box bikes basically are pumped off the line at an Asian location and having been to China, I know how quickly some of these Chinese plants can retool to utilize some other component to maintain their production pace!

All these Royce Union bikes, though the same make and model, had a variety of crank set the crankset being the part that connects your to pedals through, for example. (the crankset is the hub at the bottom on which the pedals attach on each side, for those that don’t know the lingo). Several others had a completely different crankset and yet a few others had a third variant of a crankset. What I surmise is that as Royce Union plant in Asia was pumping out bikes, they would run out of a particular crankset and their buyers would run out into the market, find a crank set from another supplier and then retool their bikes to utilize those cranksets!

I ran into the same issue on other elements of the bike: stem, seat post, seat mount, etc.

I guess the point of the story is not that big box store bikes or other equipment or materials coming out of Asia are poor quality, It’s just that when it comes to bicycles, for example, being an avid cyclist you want as many things to be interchangeable and replaceable and upgradable as possible and these big box department store bikes with the variety of different components they have are almost impossible to be able to do that. If you had taken one of these bikes in to your local bike shop for a repair, they very likely could not have given you a repair, because they wouldn’t have the interchangeable part to replace for you. Bikes that cost $100 or $200 more at a local bike shop will have interchangeable crankset, interchangeable pedals, interchangeable headsets, and handlebars and seatpost. You can upgrade as often as you need to and keep a bike on the road. In fact of my five bikes, my oldest being a Puch Pathfinder bought in 1978, my mountain bike was bought in 2006, my cyclocross bike in 2007 and my road bike in 2009. Every single one of them has easy to replace and repair components to keep these bikes on the road for another 20 or 30 years.

So keep this in mind if you go to buy a bicycle. Yeah, by all means, take a look at the bicycles at your big box store. But then, before you buy it go double-check the bikes at your local bike shop. I suggest you’re going to find that the cheapest bike at your local bike shop, while maybe a little bit more than at Walmart, will be heads and shoulders in quality above the bike that you would buy at the Walmart.