Bike industry Tariffs got lifted months ago. Where have you been ? And in fact, companies like Rad, who supposedly 'ate' the tariffs, did not afterall 'eat' anything, as companies were all retroactively reimbursed by the government for everything they had sold that were charged tariffs for, during the time period it all occured. The REAL issue, is first and foremost, that all these bike products are pretty much single sourced from China. Basically 90% of the industry is there. Then that industry all in one country, got bludgeoned by COVID 19. ZERO diversification of factories for so many of the parts in the entire supply chain. Its a lesson in abject supply chain management stupidity. So we all are now paying the price for that stupidity by the industry, as many Chinese owned bike factories, and bike parts related factories, all got shut down for 4 to 5 months, due to China's CCP locking it all down for Covid 19. The rest after that is history. As lockdowns on our end, spurred unprecedented demand for bikes and ebikes, clearing out shelves in most big box stores carrying bikes within 60 days of beginning of our lockdowns. Then next were bike shops, that maybe had inventory for another 60 days past the big boxes, and then a number of independent shops had no inventory of bikes to sell, and had to wait, and hope and pray they could find any bikes from anywhere, other than their traditional suppliers.
Lets hope that a silver lining of very hard lessons learned, (i.e. all the retailers who missed out big on the demand bc they had zero inventory for months this year) forces the hands of the bike and ebike importers, and respective OEMs, and they all start the very hard work of heavily diversifying said factories to other countries, even if it takes the same 3 decades, it took for us to hand it all over to China, starting back in the 70's and 80's, to where they are today having a virtual lock on the entire bike industry supply chain. (as they do with many other manufactured products in many industries, thanks to US CEO's and execs, chasing those big fat short term oriented, and incentivized stock bonuses, and golden parachutes. Big pharma is another guilty party in that regard. China has a lot of US industries by their short hairs. )
You can run, but you can't hide ...
