Seattle has lost another bike shop. Ride Bicycles is closing its Seattle location after 14 years, consolidating into its Issaquah location while also shifting to an online retail focus.

“The lease was up, so I had to make a decision,” said owner Christiaan Bourdrez. “I was going back and forth and back and forth all summer long, and I finally decided if I’m going back and forth this much, then I probably shouldn’t do it.” With insurance costs rising 40% year-over-year, increasing inflation and falling retail margins due to bike industry oversupply, Bourdrez decided against committing to a new lease. “I’m not comfortable being that stressed out anymore,” he said, and he didn’t want to take the risk amid uncertainty for the bike industry. “The economic wind is not really blowing in our direction.”

The Roosevelt shop will be open regular hours through Sunday (December 22), and most remaining items are 50% off. There are only a few bikes left, but they do have a good number of parts and accessories. “Any home mechanics should probably come out and grab some parts,” said Bourdrez.

Ride Bicycles is just the latest in a series of major bike shop closures in recent years. Long-running general purpose shops like Velo Bike Shop and Counterbalance Bicycles closed in 2023, and then Back Alley Bike Repair and the electric cargo bike specialty shop G&O Family Cyclery closed in early 2024. Many of the economic challenges Bourdrez described sound similar to what Peter Clark of Counterbalance told us a little over a year ago: Insurance rates are skyrocketing, other business costs are increasing, and all the retail margins are shrinking. Put this all together, and the business model of a retail bike shop looks very shaky.

“I’m no Nostradamus,” said Bourdrez, but “maybe we’re a canary in the coal mine. I certainly hope I’m wrong […] There could be a bigger business cycle coming to an end.” Ride Bicycles opened 14 years ago in a small space at Ravenna Boulevard and Roosevelt, then moved to its current space at 64th and Roosevelt in 2014. They were a Seattle Bike Blog advertiser for several years back when I made the jump to doing this work full-time, so the shop holds a special place in this site’s history. At the time, Bourdrez was focused heavily on practical city bikes. “We don’t carry anything that doesn’t allow fenders or racks,” he told Seattle Bike Blog in 2014.

Over the past decade, however, the basic premise for how a retail-plus-service bike shop functions has been upended, he said. “Bike shops went from making a lot of money on bikes and accessories and using that to subsidize service to now maybe needing to charge properly for service.” He still encourages people who want to start a bike shop in Seattle to do it, but his advice is to focus on properly-priced service rather than relying on retail margins. Seattle bike riders may also need to be prepared to spend significantly more on service than the rates they are used to. “Service is at $120 an hour and moving up to $150, and I’m thinking we need to be closer to $180,” a 50% increase. As forces outside a shop owner’s control eat away at the retail margins, there are only a few levers left to pull with the two big ones being employee compensation and service pricing. If you want to do right by workers and retain talent, then there’s only one lever left for someone running a traditional retail bike shop: Service pricing.

Before 2023, a call for increases in bike shop service prices might have been harder for Seattle bike riders to hear. But as the city loses general purpose shops at an alarming rate, I suspect people might be a little more understanding. I know I’d rather spend 50% more on service than lose a shop entirely. However, affordable maintenance has long been one of the big benefits of bicycling for transportation, so there would certainly be significant downsides to increasing service pricing. Seattle’s bike shop economy is in a bad place.

It’s not all bad news for bike riders. If you’re in the market for a new bike or a major parts upgrade, you can find some great deals as shops and distributors are forced to mark things down to clear out the glut of inventory. Just remember to buy from a local shop if you can because you’re investing in more than just a better warranty than what you’ll get online. You’re investing in your community by helping to keep the shop open through these tough times.

This is also a call for folks who have creative ideas for bike shop business models outside the normal retail concept. Seattle has a few of these, such as Good Weather and Peloton that have cafés or Mello Fellos who have a mobile repair business and workplace fleet maintenance services in addition to a retail shop. Maybe this is the time to launch that combination ceramics studio, bike shop and bubble tea business you’ve been dreaming about: Boba Bike & Kiln.

For its part, Ride Bicycles will be not only consolidating its local physical presence in Issaquah, it is also making a bigger play for online sales nationwide. The Ride Bicycles website has become a much bigger part of their business, and locals who buy from their site will have added benefit of having access to their Issaquah shop if needed. Bourdrez said they are trying to “expand our horizons to the lower 48. That’s who we’ve been competing with, to be frank: Businesses that sell to the whole country.” Their website sells products out of their Issaquah facilities as well as from a direct-to-customer dropship operation Ride Bicycles and a group of other shops run out of Nevada.

As for local shops with open doors to anyone who needs to get their bikes rolling again, its time to think about what we can do through public policy to make sure people have access to bike maintenance service. The state should have its delayed e-bike subsidy available soonish, and the law was written so that these purchases must be made at a shop with a physical service location in Washington State that makes on-site repairs. Those subsidies will hopefully be a boon to local shops that sell e-bikes. But the 8,500 available rebates are likely to go fast. Both the City of Seattle and the state should look into what additional options they have to help shops that provide bike repair services to the general public. I don’t know exactly what the legal mechanism should be, but our governments should view these shops as transportation infrastructure. Losing them poses a serious challenge for our goals of increasing bicycle transportation use. Maybe they can help with the insurance issue (a 40% increase year-over-year sounds absurd, and the fact that both Ride Bicycles and Counterbalance cited insurance premium spikes is a red flag) or maybe there could be a tax break of some kind specifically for bicycle sales and services from a physical location with open hours.