Easy Like Your Sunday Best

Some things never end.

Like the mails and e-mails I get from the alumni associations and foundations of the schools I attended.  I've moved to different states and countries, changed my name and even had mail delivery stopped during a time when I was feeling depressed and hermetic.  About the only thing those schools didn't seem to know is my financial situation:  They hit me up for money, whether or not I have it!

Then there are those mails and e-mails you get from retailers.  You might have bought an inner tube or a beanie ten years ago, but they send you announcements of the sales they always seem to be running.  Some of them spend more trying to sell more to you than you spent in their establishments in the first place!

One such e-mail I received today is trying to get me to buy "discounted" bike jerseys that were way overpriced to begin with.  I had to chuckle at one of those offers, though:  for a Castelli jersey called "Sunday Best".

Growing up in blue-collar Italian-American Brooklyn and New Jersey, I never heard the term.  It still sounds vaguely WASP-y to me.  So, perhaps, it's no surprise that the jersey looks like this:

If that jersey has anything to do with Sunday, the design makes me think of the Episcopal Church--which, according to Robin Williams (who grew up in it), offers all of the ceremony of the Roman Catholic Church (in which I grew up) with half of the guilt.

When I attended Catholic school, we wore our school uniforms to church.  After my family moved to New Jersey, dress codes relaxed and most of us didn't have a "best" outfit for church:  We just cleaned ourselves up and made ourselves more or less presentable.  For most of my adult life, I haven't attended church and when I go to any sort of social function, it's usually with people who don't care about what I look like.  If I wear a skirt or a tailored pair of pants, most people I know would say I'm "dressed up", though my attire might not be most people's idea of "Sunday Best."

Ironically, through all of those years I was racing or just riding with racers (or "wannabes"), my "Sunday Best" included bike kit.  Most of us took long or "fun" rides on the Lord's Day.  Or we might join organized rides, such as the one a bunch of us used to take from Brooklyn to New Hope, PA and back.  On such rides, I used to wear my "best" (or, at least, favorite) jersey or outfit.  

These days, I don't wear cycle-specific clothing, except for gloves.  So my "Sunday Best" is whatever I happen to be wearing when I'm riding on the second day of the weekend.

Now, if I'd lived another life, my "Sunday Best" might look like this:

Boxing Day And Big Box Stores

Today, the day after Christmas, is known as Boxing Day throughout the English-speaking world--except, of course, in the United States.  Here, after our so-called War of Independence, we decided to toss out everything British.  But somehow or another we managed to keep the class system, although we did away with the titles.

All right, enough political ranting.  I mention this holiday because I recall how, the first time I heard about it, I wondered whether people went to see fights or, perhaps, whether they fought each other.  (I'll bet some people fight, especially spouses and other family members, after something or another that didn't go as planned on Christmas Day!)  Perhaps South African officials realized other people thought as I did when, in that country, the holiday was re-named  Day of Goodwill in 1994.

 


In other countries, particularly England, Canada and Australia, stores offer huge discounts because most people wouldn't enter a store otherwise--unless, of course, they are exchanging gifts.  Our stores do the same, but they're simply called "Day-After-Christmas sales".

It seems that those big retail events are as much a part of small mom-and-pop stores as of "big box" outlets.  And they're part of just about every sector of the retail industry, with a few notable exceptions.

One of those exceptions is, of course, the bicycle retail industry.  The "big box" stores might offer big discounts on bikes purchased in boxes, but even those price reductions usually aren't as great as those for, say, bed linens or kitchenware, let alone Christmas decorations, gift wrapping and cards.  And small bike shops might offer relatively small discounts--say, 10 or 20 percent, in contrast to the 50-75 percent reductions typical for holiday-related items--on bicycles or even high-quality components.  Sometimes prices are slashed on bike accessories, such as computers, but the selection tends to be small.

 

When I worked in bike shops, people used to ask me why they couldn't find the sorts of sales they were accustomed to seeing on items like luggage and home electronics in bike shops.  The not-so-short answer goes something like this:  Profit margins on bicycles are fairly small.  Paradoxically, high-end bikes actually have even smaller margins than those on bikes sold to the masses.  

One reason for that is that the more you buy of something, the better a price you can get on each unit--and a bike shop simply cannot buy in the volume in which departments stores make their purchases.  In fact, even some mom-and-pop stores buy their wares in greater quantities than most shops will buy of any given model of bike.  The obvious reason is, of course, that bikes take up more space than most other items sold in most other kinds of stores.   

But even on components, few shops make mass purchases of, say, Campagnolo Record Ergo shifters or Dura-Ace cranksets.  That is because the market for such items is still small, and because those companies, and others, change their offerings more frequently than in times past (I still remember when Campagnolo and other European manufacturers made, essentially, the same derailleur or brake or other item for decades!), a shop might be stuck with a high-end item for years, or even for the life of the shop itself.  While such items might make for nice showcase displays, they don't add to the store's bottom line. 

If you do see large day-after-Christmas--or Boxing Day-- discounts on bikes or parts, you're most likely shopping online.  Companies like Performance and Chain Reaction Cycles buy in far greater quantities than any local shop ever could and therefore get better prices, which allows them to offer lower prices to customers.  In fact, an industry insider once told me that Performance actually buys whole boatloads of Shimano components and has them trucked directly to their giant warehouse.

Anyway--I avoid shopping for anything on the Boxing Day, St. Stephen Day, the Day of the Wren, the first day of Kwaanza or whatever you call 26 December, just as I avoid it on Black Friday.