We certainly struck a forthcoming batch of bike shop owners this month! They had some very interesting comments to make. As we’re running a feature about kid’s bikes in our next print edition of Bicycling Trade, we also asked about kid’s bikes this month. In particular we asked, ‘What is your opinion about selling kid's bikes? Do you make money from selling them?’

It looks like this winter has been extra cold right across Australia, (or are we all just getting a bit soft?), based upon the feedback of the six shops we called for this month’s ‘How’s Business?’

Welcome to this month’s ‘How’s Business?’ If you’re paying close attention you’ll notice a slight change in format that we’ve made thanks to constructive feedback from a dealer, who said that he found it annoying to have to scroll down to the bottom of each comment to see who was saying it.

This month’s responses to How’s Business were widely varied, with some stores seeing a big effect from the federal budget announcements and others not even mentioning them.

How’s Business is consistently one of most read stories in each monthly online edition of Bicycling Trade. Dealers say that they like reading directly what other dealers are saying, and having an alternate source of information in addition to what visiting sales reps are telling them.

Theft is an unfortunate problem for Australian bike shops, but sometimes it’s not just the bike shop owners’ stock that’s stolen.

Once again, the dealers we called at random this month were up-beat about their summer season so far.

In addition to our regular first question, ‘How’s business?’ this month we followed up by asking about staff. In particular we asked each bike shop owner if they preferred to have specialist workshop only and sales only staff or if they preferred to have staff who worked in both aspects of the business.

We had another upbeat response from most bicycle retailers this month, perhaps not so surprising when we were calling during the middle of the peak selling season.

Not surprisingly, the six shops we called around Australia this month were all busy in the midst of what is traditionally the busiest time of year for bike shops.

With Christmas looming closer, for this month’s follow up question for How’s Business we asked how long each store planned to be closed over Christmas.

As we do every month, we phoned six retailers, one per State or Territory, spread throughout Australia and simply asked them, ‘How’s Business?’

Welcome to our monthly survey of six bike shops, selected at random from across Australia, with no more than one per state or territory.

This month, as well as asking about business in general, we asked about theft.

Welcome to our monthly survey of six bike shops, selected at random from across Australia, with no more than one per state or territory.