Are you noticing this trend.

The Dealer-LBS are dieing out and going out of business. People are not buying expensive dealer bikes anymore but ordering directly online. The ''LBS'' industry is dieing.

However, the obscure fix-your-bike ''shops'' that aren't dealers, but fix your bike for cheap and sell cheap used bikes, won't die out. But there's no real place for tradesmen in these shops most of them are populated by rehabs and supported by the government programs who can only do basic stuff.

The large retailers are taking over and the only way for the intelligent bike-mechanic to survive is to become a specialist mechanic at one of these larger companies. The bike mechanic trade will enter a higher level and be more required from him in terms of trade knowledge, and stigma of this trade only being for idiots will disappear since these idiots won't be able to get a job.

The other alternative for the bike mechanic is to accept being poor forever and just trying to get by fixing shit. Because selling is dead and we all know current lbs can't survive on fixing, but the lonesome poor bike mechanic who works in a shed might.

So the middle ground for the bike mechanic is going to disappear. You are either going to be a poor ass bike mechanic fixing crap all day or you are going to be a specialist bike mechanic at giant assembling and repairing e-bikes and doing the higher end of the scale of bike work.