Brick and mortar stores could initially compete with online merchants because of ship times and charges associated with online purchases. Along comes Amazon Prime and now the shipping wait and cost are no more. Until CarMax came along, you had to brush up on your martial arts skills and poker face to fend off the circling car salesmen at the dealership. Now, you see the car online, kick the tires at the CarMax lot and go inside and tell the salesperson you want to take a test drive. The price on the sticker is non-negotiable.
I see an opportunity here for community colleges in bike friendly cities to train ebike technicians. If they offer a night class I'll sign up!
What a wonderful idea! Have you talked to your local CC about it? Your idea is probably premature until e-bikes become more of a commodity, but I think you are on to something.
They could start with basic mechanical bicycle repair since that is the basis of all E-bikes. Bikes shops and mechanics are slowly dying off. All the basics are the same as regular bicycles and really needed for a strong foundation in Ebikes. I own a machine shop and all the kids coming out of the Voc. Tech. schools are all missing the manual machining and basic skills needed to become a machinist. The schools skip over it because CNC machining and CAD/CAM is more exciting for the kids. But this does not help us who are in the industry. The foundational skills are missing. We have found it more beneficial to find people with ambition, good work ethics, and a willingness to learn much easier to train. This works out much better than trying to re-train someone who has been trained incorrectly from the start. We have a saying "You can make a CNC master out of a machinist but you cannot make a machinist out of a CNC master"
Looks pretty cool and the tuition rates really aren't that bad. I've seen colleagues spend more on a 3-day computer certification boot camp and still not pass the exam.
