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. Depending on your perspective on the industry, you might be surprised about the size of mass market, or the size of traditional bike shops.
Nonetheless, it is clear that consumers view both styles of purchasing equally when it comes to bicycle purchases. Looking at rest of market data from Circana, it seems that children’s bikes are much stronger in these mass market locations, due to their much lower prices.
Within the Bike Shop category, traditional independent bike stores dominate the location share. Although there was a sizable amount of acquisition of retail locations by brands before and during the pandemic, they still only account for a small share of total 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. You can see my recent blog post about estimating the size of the Norwegian market here.
A bonus for you nerds who read to the bottom: did you notice how the roughly 18,000 locations is roughly the square root of the ~330 million Americans in the US?