Web Reviews

I am so sick of negative web reviews of our shop. It seems like the websites that offer this service have become a sort of defacto extortion mechanism. If we pay $170 a month to these sites, we will have more juice against these negative reviews. People who do not speak up when they are uncomfortable or confused in a small shop now have an effective vehicle for lashing out. Sometimes we have friends or regular customers hanging out watching their bikes being fixed or helping us out. New customers can perceive them as being staff and assume that these "staff" are ignoring them. That night a negative review comes up and hurts our business, denying us the money to hire more help. People who have an axe to grind with us like former business partners, or stalkers or people who thought they were entitled to unlimited credit or free work or something like that now have a great way of expressing themselves. I should know because I was tempted to do this to my former business partner who is a total moron and ripped me off of dozens of thousands of dollars. After thinking it through and imagining all the facts that I could put in that review that would horrify prospective customers on their iphones, I remembered that I have plenty of constructive things I can do to better this shop and my life. If I have a complaint with someone, I can talk to them in person like an adult.
These review sites are a great David vs. Goliath vehicle and should be used more like that, but I gotta tell you, if you read the negative reviews of our shop you would think that we are all "hipsters" and total bike snobs. We are all native New Yorkers and grown men. Calling people hipsters seems to be a yuppie insult for people who have not bought into all the advertising messages telling us to always wear new clothes and spend half our waking hours primping and preening. I do not shave my chest, balls or underarms. Sometimes I work so hard I cannot find time to shave for a few weeks. My clothes I wear for working on greasy filthy bicycles are not new and fresh off the rack from D&G. That does not mean I am a hipster. I listen to Jazz, my business partners listens to rap and classic rock. At the end of the day, I don't think anyone even knows what a hipster is. I thought of hipsters as people who wear vintage clothes, kind of post-punk crossed with rock-a-billy. People who listened to alternative rock or grunge. That is the most thought I ever gave to the term. Now that haters have persisted in labeling us as hipsters, I have come to the conclusion that it is a term used to put people down who do not buy into the i-lifestyle. People who are not interested in being metrosexual and shopping as the highest form of expression in their lives. These haters have made me want to claim the label and wear it, if I had not spent so many years negatively associating it. At the end of the day, labels like T3RR0R15T, hipster, yuppy, ghetto, fag, the n-word, and many more are simply tools used to separate and de-humanize people and make it that much easier for our lives to devolve that much closer to slavery so that a select few people can be excessively, gluttonously wealthy. Buying into prejudice of this sort only accelerates the degradation and alienation of our social and economic lives. I admit that there are ways that I can slip into this labeling BS, but my awareness of this is coupled with an effort to eradicate it in myself and our shop. Our shop is very welcoming and inclusive, we are doing the best we can as imperfect people in an imperfect world.
From time to time we may have just finished paying the slave master, I mean landlord, or some other such hated scourge of small business in NYC, and may not be able to muster enough zest while answering the same question that we have been asked ten thousand times before. I can see that as coming off as snobbery and to a certain extent it may be. However if you want to see bicycle snobbery, you should go to Cadence, Tr@ckstar or R&A. I do not like being called a bike snob when I happily work on Huffies or Murrays. We DO offer information to people when it seems that they are interested in hearing it.
For example: "this Huffy is what I would call an imitation bicycle" because it is such low quality that it is not worth the hundreds of dollars that it would take to make it as close to safe as it can be (which is not safe enough for any of my friends or loved-ones). If that comes off as a personal affront to the customer, it is certainly not intended to be one. We are actually taking time that we could be spending GENERATING MONEY to offer the customer FREE information gleaned from the blood, sweat and tears of dozens of hours spent trying to make these bikes work for people that could not afford a safer, lighter, funner bike.
I have said in print many times, I applaud ALL cyclists for not driving cars, trucks or tanks and armored personnel carriers. Cyclists are all heroes. Even weekend warriors that put their bikes on their cars and drive somewhere to go for a ride. If you wanna write a negative review of a place, try politely addressing your complaint with the staff. You will almost always make the world a little better place.