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Hello, Everyone.
Stuart, I really like your idea about approaching QBP.
My new seed catalogues have lovely icons telling me which
seeds are heirloom varieties, which are organic, etc. They even
have a pretty little snowflake to help people up in Northern
Ontario pick seeds that can tolerate their conditions. It would be
great if QBP's catalogue had icons for union/ fairtrade/ local/
etc.
Asking existing suppliers/distributers if they could offer
discounts makes more sense to me than creating an inefficient
version of their infrastructure.
While there are many super well organized people who work
or play at Community Bike Shops, the idea of a warehouse and
distrubition network run by the likes of us seems like a bad idea.
Have you ever been at a meeting where people spend almost an hour
discussing the way we should spell women/wimmin/wymyn?
Our shops perform magical feats of bicycle relclamation and
we contribute to improving neighbourhoods and to helping people
feel competant and connected. Sometimes I feel as if my local CBS
is saving the world one spiffed up junker at a time. I love us. But
somehow I don't see us running a continental just-in-time delivery
system for bike parts.
Working together online to craft a proposal to pitch to QBP
and any other suppliers or distributers seems doable. So does
creating national or international (or perhaps just several
regional) organization(s) of community bike shops for the purposes
of getting good deals from suppliers, etc.
Does anyone feel knowlegable enough about how it could
work to draft something to circulate? Having a nice tangible thing
or plan to discuss at this year's bikebike would be good.
Sasha
On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:55:25 -0400 Stuart O Anderson
<soa@ri.cmu.edu> wrote:
At Free Ride we have a purchasing policy that directs us to buy
local,
union, and sustainable products when they are available. If there
were a distributor that could source parts the best complied with
this
policy I think we'd definitely be interested.
Of course, this would be a huge undertaking for the person(s) that
wanted to do it. I imagine one has to order in very large
quantities
>from manufacturers to be able to offer wholesale prices comparable
to
other distributors, and that the amount of cash tied up in stock
at
any given time is rather signficant. Having to rent or maintain a
warehouse on top of that means that there's a minimum rate of
consumption a distributor would need to maintain to avoid losing
money. That rate is going to depend on the size of the niche
market
for community bike shops, and the assumption that other
distributors
wont alter their own policies to capture that market - it's not
clear
to me that there is enough demand, even combining all the major
community bike shops into a single bloc, to solely support a
single
distribution operation. But that's just a guess and a real answer
would require market research on the part of interested parties.
It seems to me that QBP supplies most of the CBS's right now.
Maybe
someone should approach them about identifying and stocking
products
that conform to our purchasing policies (i.e. green/fair trade/us
made/union made/etc icons in the catalog) and ask about discounts
for
non-profits promiting bicycle use? I'd think the best way for
that to
happen would be for several shops to work together to create a
request
that could be delivered on all our behalfs. Does this interest
anyone
- I'd be willing to help with such a project.
Stuart
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