In the early days of COVID, when the air was still thick with Lysol and uncertainty, I did what millions of Americans did: stayed inside, wiped down my groceries, and waited.
But after months of lockdown and a shut-down gym, I needed to move. Not spiritually. Physically. My body was screaming for motion.
So, I figured I’d get a bike—ride the neighborhood, stretch the legs, feel the wind again.
Simple plan, right?
Wrong.
By the time I got to a bike shop, it was like showing up to a BBQ after everyone had already eaten—the racks were picked clean.
Empty racks. No tires. No helmets. I asked another shop owner when he expected a shipment, he said, Maybe August. Maybe never.”
Turns out I was late to the game. Americans, cooped up and stir-crazy, had collectively decided that biking was the way out—literally.
No gym? Ride a bike.
No beach? Ride a bike.
No bar, no friends, no distractions? Ride. A. Damn. Bike.
And so the Great Bicycle Shortage of 2020 was born.
Here’s what went down:
- Bike demand skyrocketed like toilet paper in March.
- Most bikes—and their parts—come from factories in China and Taiwan, which were either locked down or months behind on shipments.
- Shipping containers were stuck. Ports were jammed.
- Inventory dried up. Prices spiked.
- Craigslist became the new Schwinn dealership.
But one bike shop owner told me something else—a detail most folks missed:
“You know where those bikes come from? Recycled cans. We send aluminum scrap to China. They melt it, mold it, and send us the bikes. But when everything stopped, that loop broke. No cans out, no bikes back.”
Let that sink in: your beer can may have been on its way to becoming your bike. Until the world shut down.
It wasn’t just about exercise—it was about freedom. In a world reduced to living rooms and Zoom fatigue, bikes became our escape hatches.
But this isn’t just a tale from the past. We’re staring down a second round.
Now, with the return of sky-high tariffs on Chinese goods, we’re setting ourselves up for another shortage—not because of a virus this time, but because of policy.
Already, companies like Wyze are paying more in tariffs than the value of their imported products. And it’s not just smart cameras and floodlights—bikes, tools, electronics, appliances, and raw materials are all on the chopping block.
Tariffs aren’t some abstract punishment for foreign factories—they’re taxes on everything we try to buy and build.
They gum up the works. They jack up prices.
They make it harder to recover when a crisis strikes.
So yeah, I remember what it felt like, standing in that bike shop, looking at a sea of nothing, thinking:
So this is what scarcity feels like in America.
And if we keep charging forward with these tariffs?
We’ll feel it again.
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