The bike shops I've applied to have offered the same as I was making at #REI or better. Except one yesterday offered me less and no other benefits and then seemed shocked when I asked about healthcare. The owner seemed to care about his employees, but was also confused about not being able to find anyone. I get that bike shops as a business model just don't work in the U.S., but where do places like this expect to find workers with no rent to pay or other bills at all?
@robryk@sanedragon oh I love that idea! I would love to see something like that around here where buyers know that a mechanic has looked it over and sellers get the benefit of more buyers browsing all at once!
have mechanics to answer questions (for example, it's sometimes not obvious if a bike can take panniers),
try to figure out if any of the bikes are stolen beforehand,
deal with actually selling the bike so the seller doesn't need to be there the whole day (they just drop off the bike in the morning and pick up money or bike in the evening),
have some sort of setup where you can take one of the bikes for a test ride.
In general it seems to me that a large part of the reason why that feels very nice (from a buyer's perspective at least) is that they remove incentives to be dishonest, so that everyone taking part can just be calm, trusting, and assume the same of others and won't be harmed by that. On the other hand, I think that a large reason why this became a major thing (there are nonspecialized flea markets and you can buy/sell bikes there too) is in large part that it's very hassle-free for sellers.
Regarding the place, Zurich has a few squares in the city center, which tend to get used for such things (I'm actually not sure how that works formally tbh). Sadly that's probably one of the larger problems with setting something like that up in the US (or am I very off?).
To give you a order of magnitude estimate, there is one such flea market organized every month Spring-Autumn in Zurich (pop. ~700k city, ~1.5M agglo) and I'd estimate that there is a bit below 1000 bikes there ~each time.
The bike shop I work at, #REI, just got back to me to tell me that they are going ahead with their policy of installing cameras in the shop to monitor employees. They say these are not used to track productivity, but the CEO is a union busting ex-Amazon executive and he has given himself that power, so that's enough for me. My last day will be mid-May and I am now properly desperate to find a new job before I loose my house. Leads in the bike or software industry welcome in or around #Atlanta.
On the bike side of things I have around 5 years of experience as a mechanic, shop coordinator, and trainer. Everything from basic tune ups to fork and shock work to service advising and shop operations.
On the tech side I have ~13 years experience in back end web systems, API design, and realtime communications. Mostly in Go and Rust.
#REI continues in their #UnionBusting efforts, working swiftly to continue alienating customers and firing low-level managers for essentially no reason. They are doing a great job demonstrating why being a #CoOp doesn't guarantee good #labor policy. I hope they will wake up to the fact that they need to treat their employees better and stop interfering with their attempts to #unionize, and penalizing managers put into a difficult position.
REI sent us a survey. I filled out the survey, but instead of actually answering their questions, on every page where there was an "Other" option with a text field, I selected it and wrote in the box "we will not be shopping at REI again until you stop union-busting and negotiate in good faith with your employees' unions."
Ref: https://www.ourrei.com/ #REI#union#REIUnion#solidarity