that has been an issue at our shop, so we made a rule: no staff can buy a fancy part unless it has been sitting on the shelf for more than a month. i think there are better ways of appreciating a volunteer staff - volunteer appreciation events (we went to gameworks!), the satisfaction of doing good work, etc. be creative!
plus the volunteers can still buy the part, they just have to wait a month. i agree that letting staff have dibs undercuts the shops' ability to serve the community - plus it just looks bad (like embezzlement bad) when all the staff have shiny new things and everyone else is left digging through rusty buckets. :)
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:19 AM, kyle mckinley <bicirider@gmail.com> wrote:I like the perspective that Allison offers; it pretty neatly matches the way that BICAS and Bike Church Santa Cruz tend to think (generally).
bike church offers work trade at $10/hr, BICAS at $8/hr (I think that's still accurate).
By emphasizing that anyone can buy any of the stuff (with cash or labor), we become more invested in building a functional worktrade system. For now, of course, it is usually a big drain on skilled mechanic's time. The hope is that we can figure out strategies through which that (unskilled) labor reaps rewards for the shop/collective that are equal to the worktrade wage.
It seems to me like the shop benefits in either of the scenarios suggested; charging a near-market price sure helps pay the rent. It becomes only a problem if parts are radically under-valued (and cherry-picked for profit) or over-priced (and fully functional stuff sit around as fetish items... not that pretty parts can't just be pretty some times, but we've all seen those shops that have no interest in helping people actually ride their bikes).
This thread (subtly) raises another important topic:
at many shops the best parts get snagged by mechanics/ committed volunteers. I have certainly been as guilty of this as the next person. For many organizations this is a perfectly reasonable way to informally compensate folks for the many hours of unpaid work they do. It might be the case, in the long run, however, that this tendency undercuts our ability to serve folks/ grow our shops. Are there shops where this has been an issue? Useful ways of addressing it?
best,
kyle--On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:10 AM, allison karow <bike.saviours@gmail.com> wrote:
at our shop we have a "fancy parts" case in which we place everything that is too nice to go in the bins.
all parts are priced at what we call ebay level, which means we research each part and price it so that it cannot be resold for a profit (more or less). ( i look at craigslist, ebay, and new price parts online and find something fair.)
all parts in the fancy case are available for cash OR work trade, which is $8/hour. if someone wants to do work trade they can check in with the greeter and be assigned a task (from a list on our whiteboard) according to their skill level. we don't really have a problem with letting people do work trade for nice parts, why shouldn't they be able to get a nice part if they don't have the money but are willing to do the work?
On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 12:51 PM, reno bikes <renobikeproject@gmail.com> wrote:bingo--On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 4:02 PM, R Points <poster@richpoints.com> wrote:
Nice stuff pays the bills! End of story
rachael spiewak wrote:We toss nice stuff in a cabinet and try not to make a big deal out of it. Some savvy folks know about it and ask if they can take a look, and they usually give more than our $5/part suggested donation. We'll offer some of those parts to folks doing a bike build when we just can't find anything that will work for them from our ordinary pool of parts. We'd rather see that stuff go on a bike and get someone on the road than let it sit and have someone be stuck. And that's why some of our frankenbikes have strange aerodynamic carbon fiber forks sometimes. It's pretty amusing. Of course, there's the usual volunteer cherrypicking, and that's fine. We don't log hours, so it's all on an honor system, which still seems to work for us.
We did have sort of a long conversation about whether we should have a glass case or an ebay account, and we landed on not doing those things because we'd rather keep our resources circulating locally and we don't want to make an obvious visual distinction between classes of parts. We do struggle with having varied access to parts and tools depending upon fragility, ability to wreck your bike, safety issues, and cost, so the system isn't perfect, but it's good enough for now.
-rachael
On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Urban Bike Project Wilmington, DE <urbanbikeproject@gmail.com> wrote:
"you can ONLY buy the good parts with labor"That's interesting. At UBP we have almost a surplus of un-skilled labor already, so work-trade actually takes skilled volunteer away from more skilled tasks to supervise. That's why we don't really do it anymore and would rather have the cash for rent, especially from the nice stuff. We have bikes starting at $5 which take more time/parts to fix, and are subsidized by us getting money from the fancy stuff.
Brian
(the tax/paying mechanic replies were spot on, thanks!)
Urban Bike Project of Wilmington
-a 501(c)3 non-profit bike shop-
1908 N. Market Street (entrance is in the parking lot behind the building)
Wilmington, DE 19802
Hours:
Thursday 6:30-9:00
Saturday 1:00-4:00
Visit us online at http://urbanbikeproject.org
On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Joshua Goran <joshuagoran@gmail.com> wrote:
I know that the co-op I am most familiar with, Ohio City Bike Co-op in Cleveland, OH has a showcase(s) or bin that the good parts go in, and it is used along with work-trading so that you can ONLY buy the good parts with labor, so that people can't just come in, flash money, and take all the goods that could be used as incentive for volunteers. That system makes the most sense to me.
Josh
On May 12, 2009, at 4:08 PM, thethinktank-request@bikecollectives.org wrote:
What to do with the nice stuff?
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