Quote:
Originally Posted by velomonkey
The world HQ of IBM is right there - tons of employees live over there so they don't pay NY property taxes (IBM is in NY). Tons of bankers live there - bankers who go into NYC and bankers who work in CT. Trust me, that part of CT is plenty loaded. It's not a small town, but it's also not a city either - it's a bedroom community for NYC and the corporate park part of Westchester, NY.
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That's a good start, but if it is a smallish community and everyone has a bike, and their families have bikes, the shop needs something else to survive. That's why I mentioned a mobile population. You need the customer base to constantly change so that you always have new customers. It's not the high end bikes that sustain the shop, but rather the low end bikes that you can sell at higher margins and higher volume.
I have no idea why the shop closed. Perhaps the market is perfectly sustainable there. If it is a loaded community, I would guess that real estate is at a premium and might have played a role. The Internet certainly hurts many shops, but most shops don't make their money selling component groups that a sliver of the population knows they can buy from the UK at a huge discount. If that is the only customer base a shop has, then they have narrowed themselves out of business.