With revenue and hope diminishing, owner of Brown Cycles decided he will shutter his business after 25 years

Tim Harty, The Business Times

There was no “woe is me” from Chris Brown when he agreed to talk about his decision to close his bike shop, Brown Cycles, after a quarter century operating the Main Street pillar.

He made the announcement with a mid-June news release and said he’ll close in the coming weeks, possibly with a July 17 swing-dance party at the store, 549 Main St. Although, on June 16 he said the store closing might happen sooner than he thought, as the 50-percent-off sale on new items is pulling in customers.

“The way things are going, we’ll be cleared out of inventory in like the next three days,” he said. “So, I don’t know when the honeymoon of going out of business ends.

“I’m leasing the building right now, so I have the building till August 8th. I guess I can do whatever I want to with it, so even if it’s empty, we’re still gonna – we do swing dances on Friday nights. We’ll just combine our closing party with our swing-dance party that we normally do anyway, because that’s super fun.”

Instead of bemoaning his fate, Brown was candid and at times comical in talking about the end of Brown Cycles, saying industry trends in recent years are not favorable for mom-and-pop bike shops.

“Well, it’s not a sustainable business model, this thing we do in bike shops,” he said. “We’re competing against our own vendors for price, and the internet, obviously, which we always knew was coming. But I think we were hoping for a better handshake.”

He said bike shops still have value to a community. There’s value in the blood, sweat and tears that a local shop can provide and an online store can’t. He summed it up with powerful simplicity when he said, “We do things.”

Brown Cycles did all of the things that most bike shops in the Grand Valley do. They sold bikes. Repaired bikes. Rented bikes. Hosted fun biking events. But the store started doing a little less of each year after year.

“All of our things have been going down the last two, three years,” Brown said. “Our rental bikes have diminished a lot. Our service department in volume has gone down a ton. Bike sales, obviously. Pieces and parts sales, because you can just buy it online in the middle of the night.”

The internet has done to bike stores what it has done to many retail businesses.

“I get it,” Brown said. “You know, it’s convenient. It’s easy. It’s fast. American capitalism at his best, which is great, you know, so we just have to adapt or die.”

The one thing Brown Cycles didn’t do was sell electric bikes, which stands in stark contrast to other Grand Valley bike shops. That was Brown’s decision, and he stands by it.

Where the changes in the industry left Brown in recent years was in the red and facing a decision about his bike shop’s future.

“If you lose 20 or 30,000 dollars a year for three years, then you gotta review it and say, ‘What are we gonna do?’ Or do something different. Or shut it down,” he said. “And you can kind of suck it up for a little bit and hope things get better. But after a while, hope diminishes. You just have to make the hard call.”

Brown chose to close.

“It’s better to go out on your own terms than have a banknote screaming at you, telling you,” he said. “Or the state locking your door with a big chain, and then you can’t get your glasses or your coat out.”

Brown said he’s 59 years old, so thoughts of retirement didn’t factor into his decision.

“No, I would love to stay here for another 10 years,” he said, “but I can’t do it if I’m gonna live on the streets after that.”

An uncertain future awaits after Brown locks up the store for the final time, and he’s OK with his days as a bike-shop owner coming to a close. It’s been a fun ride.

“It’s just business. It’s not personal, although it feels like it,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve gotten a lot of freedom to pull shenanigans in this town. And so I’ve gotten away with a lot of stuff. So, I’ve had a great time. It’s OK. It’s a stepping stone to the next thing.

“So, what’s that? I don’t know. We’ll find out. But I’ve never had another job that wasn’t better than the one I gave up.”

The Ever-Quotable Chris Brown

Brown Cycles owner Chris Brown said a few other things worth noting when discussing the coming closure of his bike shop at 549 Main St. in downtown Grand Junction. Such as:

Everyone’s getting old

Brown chose not to sell electric bikes, so his clientele remained the people who actually want to pedal a bike.

“My market is diminishing,” Brown said. “You know, all these guys that have been riding for the last 40 years, whatever, since 1976, all just turned like 82 years old. So, that market that’s been powering the bike industry is gone.”

Then, he added, “And the kids, a handful of them ride, but not anything – like, we grew up doing this. We didn’t have PCs or computers or even Ataris. We were just out around the neighborhoods, dorking around on our bikes. This is how we live.

“Those kids are all playing with digital whatevers and having Bluetooth hooked up to things, so it’s a different world. And it’ll come back someday. Somehow, some way, something will kick it back in.”

He’ll find something to do

Asked what he’ll do next after closing his bike shop, Brown said, “I kind of got a cushion of time here, I guess. … I’m looking for a job. But this is also gonna take two or three months to unwind. 

“After you get rid of everything, you gotta go sit down and pay your taxes early, and reconcile all the accounts, and move all this stuff, and then move it again, and then move it again, because that was a bad idea. And where are you gonna put it?

“So, I got a couple months. It would be silly to go look for a job today. Then I wouldn’t be here.”

The joy of implementing weird ideas

Brown’s answer regarding the best part about owning a bike shop was a fun one.

“For me personally,” he said, “it’s to go out for a long bike ride and come up with a weird idea and then implement it the next day and then see if it works out. So that’s, I mean, the creativity part of entrepreneurship, to solve problems or to create problems or, I don’t know, create things that haven’t been done before.

“So, that’s what kind of keeps me going. I’m kind of a project-oriented guy, so we built a bicycle. We wrote a book. We went to Taiwan. Took some cruises in Greece. And we’d done some bike rides up to Glenwood on 1902 bikes. We did a lot of things. We did bike festivals in the street. We swing dance on Friday nights. Like, we have resources, and so we use them. We weld stuff. We make special-needs bikes.”

Sell good stuff that will last

There wasn’t much Brown didn’t like about operating a bike shop, so he didn’t have a ready answer for the things he won’t miss.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I like bookkeeping. I like sitting here and find out where the nickels – I’ll spend four hours trying to find a penny on a transaction. I enjoy that. I like the people part. I like the retail part.

“I was always personally more into innovation, into creation than retail. Like, I don’t sit around at night trying to figure out how I can rephrase ‘clearance sale’ and still make money at it. Some guys just drink that stuff in.

“I mean, I can display things on the wall and have a vague idea of what people might buy. But constantly playing that game, whether it’s honest or not, or truth or not: It’s the finest quality for the lowest price; I mean, that’s impossible. You can’t have the best quality for the lowest price. That always feels kind of dark and dirty to me. I don’t like to do that.

“I like to sell people good stuff that they know is gonna last. Or at least let them know that what they’re buying is junk. I’ll sell it to you, but I’m not gonna lie about it; you’re going to have to come back in six weeks and buy another one. 

“Anyway, I don’t miss that side of the retail part of it; the games feel kind of dishonest a lot of the time.”