Many years ago. I vividly remember the first time I (definitively) lost a sale to Fanatik Bike Shop in Bellingham, WA. It was a customer I knew well enough, they liked dealing with the shop I worked at, and they were prepared to spend a bit more to pay local, nobly recognizing that the dollar had done some unfavourable dancing and we’d do our darndest to price match.
Sharpened pencil in hand, even with the crappy in-season Canadian currency correction and our distributor’s generous self-assessment of their role in the transaction (and corresponding share of the profit), when I factored in all the costs of having a bike in hand in North Vancouver I figured we were close enough to earn the business. Wrong-so-wrong.
“Oh, I don’t have to pay any tax or duties. I just take the bike for a ride at Galbraith and then it’s used.”
Total to total, we would have had to pay to buy the sale, and it wasn’t the last one by a mile. I don’t know how much of the same still exists; it’s not something I really hear about anymore. But, at the time, cross-border bike shopping with a bit of dirty now-it’s-used duty dodging was all the rage and it wasn’t my place to argue with how much more bike could sometimes be purchased for the same buck.
It’s no secret that a mega-majority of the mountain bicycles we ride originate entirely in Asia. Even the most domestically derived super bikes will sport a significant number of gizmos from Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and, of course, China. And, it’s no secret that the 47th presidency of the US of A plans to excise the effluence out of everything produced in those, and all other, countries.
Despite some bountifully baffling, bemusing, befuddling, bewilderment over who atones to the treasury for tariffs, I can promise that, should they be manifested as promised, they will result in significantly higher bicycle prices state’s side.
So I posit that come January ’25 (or some couple months past; once all the night time comedy-show hosts have been suitably gulagged) our local trailheads will be pilgrimaged by 1UP-racked Teslas and camper-carrying-Tacomas festooned with CASCADIA stickers sporting so-fresh bikes ready for their baptismal bespattering.
Imagine customers of the great B’ham based brands, like Transition, picking up their raw rides at a shop here in Canuckistan for significantly less scratch and then seasoning them on single track before their trip home. Turnabout taxation tastiness?
Now I’m not saying Canadian bicycle shops should be advertising any complicity in the frontier (“oops“) forgetfulness of border transiting adults. But, if I was managing a shop next spring, I’d definitely be advertising much earlier opening hours by appointment for those that want to beat the border traffic and get in a proper day of riding.
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