One area of the bicycle industry that has remained quietly murky is how many bike shops there are in the United States. This seems simple enough to do. I can write some bots to pull retailer lists from brand websites and aggregate them together. But here is when we start running into the edge cases.
- What if they are a service only shop?
- Or a non-profit dealing with training? Is that still a bike shop?
- Why are there random other businesses on these dealer lists? Auto and moto dealerships; general stores; snow sports, etc.
We start to run into probabilities, and edge cases more than we would like. What we can do is augment this collection approach with a consumer centric one. Here, we ask the question, “where could I purchase, rent, or repair a bicycle?”. Then the breadth of possibilities opens.
This article will be an initial attempt to unify the language of the bicycle industry around the types of businesses that consumers interact with to define the broader bicycle market. Below is a flow diagram detailing how to define each type of bicycle business. Below that we will analyze how many locations there are in the US and Canada fitting into these classifications.
How many shops are there?
There is a lot in flux as to the count of retail locations. Nonetheless, the following is the result of our initial categorization efforts for the entire list of retail locations.
The big difference with Canada is an increase in outdoor retailers. This makes sense as we move to higher latitudes, there is a shorter cycling season and more need to blend categories.
Making the point more dramatically is Norway, where two thirds of retail locations are Multi-Sport.
