While many a bike brand ostriches themselves headfirst into deep loam in an effort to avoid planning for a post-pandemic drop in sales, Santa Cruz Bicycles has plans to take a proactive approach to retain their Covid customer boost – free cables & housing for life.
This program stacks onto their past success handing out free replacements for common wear items – the lifetime bearing warranty – by building the cost of extra cables and housing for dropper posts and shifters into the price of every bike sold.
It’s important to note that the program doesn’t just cover defects in manufacturing & materials. Storing your bike on the outside deck of a saltwater houseboat? SRAM isn’t going to replace your brakes when the pads fuse into the calipers. RaceFace isn’t going to mail you a bag of stem bolts when the heads all pop off. But the good folks at Santa Cruz have you covered for cables. And make sure to tell your dealer you don’t want to pay labour on the install – it’s a warranty after all.
Sadly subtle compared to a more typical all-staff-on-deck Santa Cruz announcement, the official release, coming this summer, is said to include a biked-up A Cappella performance of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird On A Wire’ by the one-and-only JT Barse.
“Like a burr on a wire | ’cause my bike is a dumpster fire | I hope my new cables are free.”
In our typically thorough Bicycle Enquirer fashion, we’ve reached out to the competition for feedback on this fresh customer retention program. As of press time we’ve had only limited responses. Timothy, in shipping, at Specialized claimed that every Specialized bike sold includes a lifetime of free wind tunnel photos on the Specialized Instagram page. Taking a different tack, Yeti Cycles noted that they expect all dentists to be riding SRAM and Shimano wireless drivetrains and dropper posts by the end of July and so introducing a similar program would be cynical on their part. Trek had no comment but invoiced us for two mint juleps after Gary Fisher passed out trying to explain how he’d invented giving away common bicycle wear items for free and had to be revived.
We’ll continue to update with more pedantic and peevish parries from their peers as we receive perspectives on this program.