At Large

AT LARGE

Earthquakes in dealerland

Steven L. Thompson

ONCE, I’D HAVE CONSIDERED A MOtorcycle dealership like Tyson and Stav Rose’s a common enough sort of place in the two-wheeled world. A mom-and-pop shop, full of good humor, free coffee, a dog named Hector and the guarantee of good company in the form of customers who stopped into the shop just to hang around, swap stories and maybe learn something about motorcycles, roads, destinations and people. As well as to have an old bike serviced, or to buy a new one.

When Ty and Stav closed down their store in Frederick, Maryland, a few years back, I figured somebody else would step in to fill their shoes. Motorcycling’s like that, I thought.

Not quite. Seems the same pressures that ended Ty and Stav’s decade as dealers have significantly altered the dealership landscape of America. It’s an important change. Because a motorcycle dealer isn’t just a person who sells motorcycles, and a dealership isn’t just a service and sales establishment. When it’s at its best, a motorcycle dealership is a place where dreams become reality. It’s not just because of the hardware on the showroom floor. It’s because of the people who gather there.

In any good bike shop, the people who gather are, well, everybody. Cruiser riders. Touring types. Racers, would-be and wannabe racers. Dirt guys. Fair-weather-weekend riders and Iron Butted folks with thousandyard stares. Commuters. You. Me. Everybody.

We don’t just gather to look at new bikes. We gather at the best dealerships because such a place provides what we need: information, fellowship, and expanded horizons. A dealership is neutral and familiar ground, where we can observe and consider options; the Iron Butt guy can imagine riding a GSX-R, or a knee-dragger can sit on a Gold Wing. At a dealership, we can get new ideas, new directions for our motorcycling lives. Not to mention free coffee.

For the past 80 years or so, nobody had to teach motorcycle dealers or would-be dealers any of this, because they were us. They knew what attracted them to a dealership, and they provided the same things, whether they thought deeply about it or not.

Tyson and Stav are good examples. They both hold Ph.D.s and had been comfortably ensconced in the world of academic research when they decided that opening the kind of shop that had given them so much pleasure would be a better way of life, if not as secure or economically rewarding. And for a decade, it was. They made money and friends by providing just that kind of place, and service. But things change, and nothing has changed so much as the economics of the moto-biz.

As the number of manufacturers in the world has dwindled, so have the opportunities for dealers. When Ty and Stav hung out their shingle, a dealer could hope to make a living selling machinery from all over the world. By the time they closed their shop, that world had shrunk dramatically, depending on how you count, to between seven and nine major marques. This lack of choice has had potent and usually unappreciated effects, not just for the diversity of what you and I can buy and ride, but for dealers and how they make a living.

The most important effect has been the increase in the leverage of the manufacturers on the dealers. In theory, a dealer can be an independent business, buying hardware and reselling it as he/she chooses. In fact, what has happened is that a dealer who wishes to succeed must increasingly play the game according to rules set not in his mind, or his constituencies’, but in the board rooms of the manufacturers and their subsidiary distribution companies.

I noticed this the first time I realized that I was in a Honda shop that more closely resembled an upscale department store than a place I’d meet somebody with a cup of coffee and a tall tale to tell. I wandered around the brightly colored racks of accessories, the carefully arranged motorcycles, the high-pressure sales video displays and was quickly set upon by a salesman who lost interest in me the instant he realized I wasn’t going to buy something in the next 15 seconds. Not only had the place been remodeled to get rid of the coffee pot it once had, there wasn’t even a soda machine. The message playing here was: Buy or get out. Now.

Dealerships like this one have sprung up all over the country, thanks not only to pressure from manufacturers for dealers to redesign their shops and methods of doing business, but also from self-anointed sales gurus who travel the country preaching a new gospel to desperate dealers who could not make the old ways pay enough in the new days. Tyson and Stav are far from alone in their reluctant flight from the business.

The more the pressure built for them to turn their store into just a business, the less they liked it, regardless of how much more money such a change might have made them. When they decided to leave, it was as much because they couldn’t bear to leave their old friends and customers alone in a soulless, mall-like store as because they didn’t like the shrinking bottom line.

Across the country, the story’s the same. Maybe it’s just a phase. Maybe some ingenious and courageous dealers will find a means to meld what we need—even when we’re not about to buy a bike today—with what the cash register needs. Maybe more than a few dealers will see that the resulting loyalty, built up over years, day by day and customer by customer, is a more important commodity than glitzy showrooms and sales techniques lifted from the sharks in the car dealerships.

But maybe not. And if not, then we’re all about to lose more than just free coffee.