Interesting idea, Bill. Kind of like Community Supported Bicycles, along the concept of Community Supported Agriculture. I recall Riv having tried something along these lines as a one-time thing, but not a formal program. I wonder how that went.
While it's true that this is mainly a financial issue, that gets more complex in a company that also has other strong values in addition to the bottom line, as well as a likely emotional content that could be problematic in such a situation. While by no means a direct comparison, some of the same issues that Riv faces were ones that William Morris and the craft movement <http://thephilosophersmail.com/capitalism/the-great-philosophers-william-morris/> attempted to deal with. Trying to run a company that attempts to adhere to a set of values that can run contrary to squeezing nickels out of every pore is not easy. It *is* interesting and important, though, because the global economy as it was envisioned is faltering, and will not work much longer. There are no direct and clear answers or solutions, but every attempt at creating useful objects and rewarding work that tries to address some of the ways the current system is not working/actively harmful is worth supporting whenever possible. Because there is such an effort to make every bicycle useful, overlap is inevitable. Someone mentioned retooling the Roadeo to accept wider tires, but I suspect that would only make things even harder. There is the matter of evolving design parameters--upright, extrawide tires, loooong chainstays. If that is a firm belief, creating the Rivendell line exclusively with these features would be one way to go. And/Or, for marketing clarity, to create two distinct classes of Riv to put the various bikes under on the website. *Classic Road* Roadeo/tig roadeo; AHH; Sam; Cheviot. *Street and Trail* Hunq; Atlantis; Appaloosa; Clem. Probably not something overly appealing to the company approach, to strictly categorize like this, but I do believe it could help sell more bicycles. Further distinction and breakdown in the taxonomy would of course be in the intro to each section and the individual model page, written by the excellent in-house marketing dept. Based on what others are saying about frames that are ordered individually vs. in bulk, they could then pick one bulk order frame from each category to rest for a cycle or two (Which I believe they kind of do already. Somewhat related: One aspect of the Riv website I find mildly confusing is there seems to be a number of place where the same model is presented. I realize this has something to to with stock, complete builds, etc., but that could be done better.) On Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 1:13:12 PM UTC-4, Bill Lindsay wrote: > > > The real solution (in my mind) is a Riv FSA program (FSA=Flexible Spending > Account). If 250 debt-free Riv customers each bought a $2000 store credit > from Rivendell today, that would be a half-million in cash that Riv could > use to ride through the ups and downs. I > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
