The Market Had Its Say?

This week, I made the once-every-couple-of-months Twin Cities tour with my wife. Mostly, she had chores and errands to do, but when she stopped at Har Mar Mall to buy art supplies, I snuck out to peruse Barnes and Noble. I got stopped at the magazine rack looking at electric bicycle magazines and articles. After a bit of that, I decided to see what is left of the motorcycle glossy press.

It took a while to find either motorcycle or car magazines. The “Transportation” rack is as far from the entrance and traffic as possible and appears to be barely maintained. Several of the magazines were May and June issues. That was true for the car rags, also. On top of that neglect, a good number of motorcycle “magazines” were actually retrospective “special issues” that could have been sitting on the shelf for months; or years. Along the same lines, a Rolling Stone “special issue” was about Mick Jagger, if that gives you a clue as to the currency of that magazine format.

On the other hand, the bicycle section was featured under “Sports” and there were a lot of magazines and articles about electric bicycles in both magazines dedicated to electric bikes and the more mainstream mostly-manual powered bike magazines. The big thing here was that there are a lot of bicycle magazines and there is a lot of interest in electric bicycles; for transportation and sport. A couple of the magazines were almost as fun to read as the old Dirt Bike magazine; when it was edited by Super Hunky Rick Sieman. None of the last twenty years of dirt bike magazines have even come close to that high bar. As I suspected, the traditional motorcycle guys are putting a foot into this water, too. Electric Bike Action magazine had a big feature about Yamaha’s new electric bicycle series. To be sure, in true bicycle and bicyclist fashion, there was a lot of incredibly stupid stuff inside those magazines.

A line that particularly struck me as hilarious in the Electric Bike Action Yamaha article was, “At first we wondered if they were going to sell the bikes at their powersports dealerships. They only plan to incorporate those e-bikes into powersports dealers that already have a bike shop component, and those are few and far between. There’s a big difference between knowing how to work on a motorcycle and and knowing how to work on an electric bike.” That is true, kiddies. Anyone who can work on a fuel-injected, electronic ignition, fly-by-wire throttle-controlled, ABS’d, and state-of-the-art motorcycle will find electric bicycles to be too simple to be interesting. The customer base will lower that bar even further.

Times are changin’ and they are changin’ a lot faster than many expect. Powersports dealers are beginning to scramble for new revenue sources. It’s no stretch to imagine that a dealer who sells a few motorcycles, a few more ATVs, even more boats, and a buttload of golf carts will find a lot of reasons to become one of those “powersports dealers that already have a bike shop component.” A few bicycles on the showroom will cost a lot less than a few motorcycles that can’t be moved at any price. If that’s what it takes to get in on the electric bicycle boom, I suspect it won’t slow many dealers down.

What's the Opposite of a Grudge?

A couple of weeks ago, I listed ten (just to keep it short) companies, products, and concepts that have earned my long-lasting distrust. During the following week, I ended up at my neighborhood motorcycle accessory store buying replacement summer gloves and discovered that I naturally passed over several brands because of mediocre past experience and immediately picked out a couple of versions from the one brand the store carries that I generally like. From that experience, I decided to list a few of the companies, products, and concepts that I have (probably) unreasonable faith in

1. icon -- icon is, in fact, the company that provided the motivation for this rant. Some time back, I reviewed a pair of mid-priced icon gloves. Five years later, those gloves are still providing good service. A few years later, I reviewed a pair of icon ventilated pants that I still wear, often. Both products have been reliable, tough, and functional. When I stood in front of that rack of gloves, icon was my only real options, since I've been burned by TourMaster, Alpinestars, and FirstGear. Joe Rocket was an option, but the first pair of gloves I picked up had failing seams, I went for the icon twenty-niner and have been very happy with the choice. Lousy gloves are a memory that sticks with a rider for a long, long time. Good products have the same sticky quality.
2. Aerostich -- Just mentioning this brand is 'nough said. Aerostich makes great products and I've reviewed so many of them that it would take a page just to list the wonderful products I've bought from the company. Even the products they carry that are manufactured by other people are checked out as thoroughly and supported as consistently as their own stuff. Aerostich/Riderwearhouse is a great American-made company.
3. Yamaha -- Over the years, I have owned a variety of Yamaha motorcycles and scooters.The first was my wife's MX100 which gave her spectacular service for years before she sold it. She has nothing but fond memories of the bike and out grandson still wears her old bumblebee yellow Yamaha jersey. My first Yamaha street bike was a 1982 XTZ550 Vision that suffered at least 50k miles of LA commuting traffic before I sold it and bought a 1986 Yamaha XT350 that I still regret selling almost a decade later. Along with the XT, I owned a 1983 Vision that moved me from California to Indiana to Colorado and, finally, was sold for a profit to a guy who drove his truck all the way from LA to Denver to pick it up. My 1986 TY350 was and is, likewise, one of my all-time favorite motorcycles along with the pair of 1992 850 TDM's I owned and loved. The current mechanical love of my life is my WR250X, the most fun motorcycle I've ever ridden. The Super Ténéré I reviewed last week joined the list of impressive Yamaha motorcycles I've experienced. I've only owned one Honda, but it was an equally excellent motorcycle. My experience with Suzuki has been less consistent. My two Kawasaki's have been disappointing.  Yamaha has done very well by me and that makes any Yamaha vehicle look a little better than the rest, in my view. 
4. Dell Computers -- I own four of them: two Latitude 410 laptops, a desktop tower, and the 1012 Netbook I'm working on as I write this. The Latitude 410's were the convincer for me. After wearing out a half-dozen laptops on my motorcycle trips, including two of the grossly misnamed Panasonic Toughbooks, I stumbled on the 410 just before I left for Alaska. 70,000 miles and hundreds of hours later, that first unit is still working. So, I bought another. And another. And . . . Dell's customer service has been exceptional and knowledgeable, on the rare occasion I've needed it. 
5. Avon Tires - Way back in the 1970's, I was commuting about 60 miles a day in a VW Beetle. The Nebraska roads were poorly maintained, there was often black ice and drifted snow to contend with, and I went through a VW motor about every 60k miles and a set of tires every 15k. A rally driving friend recommended Avon tires and I bought a set. They outlasted the VW's motor and were great on those crappy roads. The whole time I lived in California, all of our cars wore Avons, but I didn't discover Avon motorcycle tires until I put a pair of Distanzias on my V-Strom. After getting 3-5k out of the previous rear tires, I doubled that with the Avons. I don't drive that much these days and my car tires usually dry out and start weather cracking before the treads are 2/3 used. I put pretty much anything that fits on the cage and, sometimes, I go cheap on the bike when city commuting is the primary task. When I'm going long on the bike, I'll go with Avons. I have never been disappointed with an Avon tire.
6. Chase Harper - Currently, I do not own any of their products. However, I have had several in the past. Their product support (warranty and repairs) is second to none. I owned a pair of Grand Millennium 4000 saddlebags for 30 years and wore them out, twice.  The company not only repaired the bags under warranty both times, but they upgraded the bags to current design standards each time. 

It's a short list, I know. I imagined I'd come up with at least ten companies, but I didn't come close. I've hung on to this post for a couple of weeks, hoping that I'd remember a few more companies on my preferred vendor list. There aren't many to choose from. Forty years ago, a Peavey sales manager explained to my partner why Peavey products were such crap, "Dan, there will never be a pre-CBS (Fender or Harley) Peavey market. We don't want any of our current products having to compete with our older products." Most modern corporations can make that same claim. None of their new stuff will last long enough to leave a memory for the majority of consumers.

An executive I worked with three decades ago once complained that "customer loyalty" is dead. He was the kind of guy who believed that warranties are made to be ignored and all of the inventory of a crappy product should be sold before the product is abandoned. He argued that our customer warranty database was a waste of time and effort, even though we were one of the few companies that stored the data customers filled out on those usually-worthless warranty registration cards. For ten years, I beat back this guy's arguments and we developed a loyal customer base that had high expectations of our company and paid a small premium for our products. A few years later, the company moved production to China, shipped a collection of marginally reliable and under-performing products, and wiped out thirty years of reputation in a few short years. Now, they are one of many equally positioned companies and battle for the lowest cost point, since customers are no longer loyal to the brand.

Customer loyalty is a two-way street. To get it, a company has to be loyal to its customers. Most companies can't even manage to be loyal to the country that provided the resources for their existence, let alone the customers who buy their products. The cost for that disloyalty is that the products become a commodity that can be purchased equally reliably -- or unreliably -- from any vendor. Once you're in that world, the only advantage you can offer is price and that means quality is sacrificed even more and customer loyalty slips away even further.

The high price for maintaining customer loyalty is beyond the capability of most corporate management. In my life, that has been the most obvious thing that is slipping away from US corporations; management with ability. The skills that we have lost and are least likely to regain are intelligent, skilled management with foresight. We can't build stuff because manufacturing management requires the most energy, talent, and commitment. Any lazy idiot can invent fraudulent security "instruments" and sell them to other fools; as long as we're willing to give up on being a nation ruled by law. The few companies that still do business responsibly and are customer-oriented deserve our business more today than ever.

Call Me "Doubting Thomas"

My MMM editor, Sev, is convinced that I hold grudges for too long. I hadn't thought about this much, but after our conversation and a recent event I realized that he's right about the first half. Regarding the second part of that assumption, I think I hold my grudges for exactly the right amount of time. The conversation began when I doubted the validity of the surface-skimming review we recently published on the Hyosung GT250. The two page love-fest-without-a-fault puff piece seemed to be more of a marketing blurb than an MMM review. Even the loud exhaust system was given a PR polishing ("I had to repeatedly look behind me to see what big bike was coming up on me. The exhaust sounding so powerful, I was sure I was going to get lapped."). The oversized picture of the vintage-looking GT showed too much detail because the marginal quality welds were obvious even in black-and-white. The positive side of the review was that it appeared to be, mostly, promoting a good local dealer; Mill City Motors. The negative side was that it appeared to be more of an apology to Hyosung than an actual critical review.

My history with Hyosung has to get in my way, though. That's where this discussion began. The fact is, I am a firm believer in "Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me." I don't forgive and forget easily. In my studio service business, I have an unbending policy that says if you don't pay me 60 day after I invoice you, the next time you need me I'll ask for a retainer before I leave home. If I don't get it, I don't do the work. If you manage to find a way to stiff me for any amount of money, I'll block your telephone number from my business and any email will go directly to the Junk folder and be automatically trashed. I'm old. I have more work than I want. I don't need new customers and people who don't pay their bills don't even qualify as "customers." They're just freeloaders.

I was reminded of my habit, again, this past week. I did some audio work for MPR and the school where I work with students from one of my classes. We've done this project a half-dozen times with some pretty substantial local bands in the past. The most recent event was with a very local band with a minimal following and who drew a couple dozen people to the show we recorded. Afterwards, the band went prima donna on us and inserted themselves into an "approval" process of the show that will probably result in the the show's cancellation. Honestly, that works for me. And from here out, if I'm asked to do anything with that group or the group's members, I'll find somewhere else to be. Burn me once . . . you know the story.

I've applied the same logic to my vendors for decades. In the motorcycle world, I've been burned twice on motorcycles: once on a brand new 1974 Suzuki RL250 and once on a barely used 1986 Kawasaki KLR600. Both bikes were unreliable crap and the Suzuki actually cost me a bit of money when I had next-to-none. It was the second new motorcycle (and the last) I've owned. I bought it in 1974 for $1,100 and a year later Suzuki dropped the price on the RL to $700 to unload their 1974 inventory and bail out of trials forever. Obviously, I took a beating; value-wise. I didn't consider owning another Suzuki until the SV650 had been well shaken out and I bought a nearly new 1999 in 2000 for about 1/2 of Blue Book. I bought my 2nd Suzuki in 2006, when I bought my barely used DL-650 for 2/3 of Blue Book. The Kawasaki was a POS from the day I bought it and the longer I owned it, the more disappointing it was. Even selling that bike was a problem. I didn't own another Kawasaki until I bought my 2000 KL250, used and cheap, in 2005. That bike was also a disappointment and I don't expect to own that brand again. Compare those experiences with my Honda, Yamaha, and, even, Rickman/Zundapp bikes and I'm uninspired to experiment again.

There is a restaurant rule that says something like, "It takes $5,000 in advertising to get a customer to try a new restaurant and 5 seconds of poor service to push that customer back out the door. It will take 5 years of marketing to get that customer to try it again." Choose your numbers, but the fact is in a world with lots of options, you don't get a lot of chances to satisfy your customers. There are no do-overs in life or business. I may be a "moto-journalist," but that doesn't make me a sucker or a shill. I'm too old and too cranky to kiss up to a half-assed Korean manufacturer of questionable quality or character. I'll give them a decade and we'll see if they are still around to review after they've settled in a bit.

There are a collection of manufacturers that I won't buy from, based on past experience and an overwhelming number of acceptable alternatives: Tascam, Sony, Presonus, Adobe, MOTU, Toshiba (Toughbooks aren't), and ProCo are among the list. The list of companies I look for when buying is probably a lot longer. I'd bet you have your biases, too. I bet even Sev has a few. Why should I pretend to be different than I am? Why would I want to?

Dougie Rocks

My kind of factory tour.