RAD RIDE : California’s Beach Crowd Leads Bikes Back to the Future
Bryce Mirtle owns a goofy-looking bike. It has thick balloon tires and a seat as wide as a watermelon.
Bryce, however, won’t go anywhere without his rusty clunker. The 16-year-old Huntington Beach student pedals it to school every day. But his favorite spot to take it is to the beach, where Bryce rides his so-called beach cruiser each morning to surfing class. “I wouldn’t be caught dead on a 10-speed bicycle,” he said. “No way.”
He--and his surfing buddies--will be seen cycling only on these back-to-basics bicycles that industry executives say are already changing the face of the industry.
Even the newest breeds of high-tech bicycles--with 15 gears and price tags that can exceed $1,000--look remarkably like these low-budget beach cruisers, with wider seats and fatter frames.
The rise in popularity of cruisers--both new and used--comes when total bicycle industry sales rose only marginally last year and are expected to be flat this year.
Nationwide, sales of cruisers were up 60% in the first five months of 1986, compared to the same period last year, reports the Bicycle Manufacturers Assn. Sales of these bicycles surpassed 500,000 last year, compared to less than 200,000 five years ago.
In an industry that sells about 11 million units annually, that still represents a very small niche, “but the very healthy increase in cruiser sales cannot be ignored,” said Michael Kershow, a spokesman for the association.
The beach cruisers are actually reverse status symbols. Much as with the popularity of pants with patches in the 1960s, it is suddenly hip to own a scruffy-looking, one-speed bike. Their origins have been closely traced to the Southland’s sun ‘n’ surfing set. And with summer’s arrival, the beach cruisers are becoming standard beach equipment, on a par with the Walkman radio and tanning mousse of recent summers.
In fact, the cruiser bikes, a throwback to their tank-like forerunners of the 1950s, have given Volkswagen Beetles the heave-ho and emerged as the newest transportation status symbol of the California surfer.
And, industry executives say, what is popular with the West Coast surfers will likely be the craze of the rest of the nation within a year or two.
Some regions are catching on already.
In Colorado, they’re tabbed “dork bikes”--a reaction to their silly looks. Back East, they’re sometimes known as “campus cruisers,” as even the college crowd has taken a liking to them. In the Midwest, some call them “beater bikes,” because they can withstand everyday obstacles such as curbs and potholes.
In California, the bikes are appropriately called beach cruisers, because beach-goers can pedal these no-nonsense bicycles over rocks, glass and sand.
“It’s a return to the old Schwinn clunkers,” said James McCullah, editor and publisher of Bicycling magazine.
Beach cruisers are leaving a particularly strong impression on the teen crowd. A collector’s version of the bike was a veritable co-star in the recent Warner Bros. motion picture “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” which featured comic Pee-Wee Herman as a boy in search of his lost bicycle.
The key market for cruiser bikes is Southern California. “It’s the perfect scouting vehicle,” said Steve Pezman, editor of Surfing magazine. “When you’re on it, you can scout the surf, scout the sand and scout the girls.”
Since Target Stores began selling the bike in Southern California three years ago, sales have doubled every year. Target now sells 25,000 annually. And at National Lumber, nearly 70% of the bicycles sold at its 19 Southland stores are cruisers.
“Sometimes I wonder where all the bikes are going,” said Stefen Krieger, bike buyer for Target Stores. “Every year, sales keep growing.” He expects sales to rocket this year, now that Target has introduced what he calls “Miami Vice” colors for cruisers, such as pink and aqua.
“Cruisers account for the largest percentage of the bike business in Southern California,” said Sam Leute, senior buyer at National Lumber, which sells “many thousands” of them annually.
Used as Loss-Leaders
So popular are these bikes that many retailers are using them as loss leaders, selling the $79-to-$150 bikes at a loss in order to attract customers into the store.
The new popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed with bicycle manufacturers, either.
Huffy Corp., the Miamisburg, Ohio, company that sells 3 million bikes annually, has seen cruiser sales rise to 10% of volume, compared to about 2% of sales 10 years ago, said a company spokesman. And Murray Ohio Manufacturing Co. said its annual sales of cruisers doubled to nearly 100,000 over the past year.
The biggest market is tan-faced, surfboard-toting teen-age boys who like to stand out from the crowd. “We can’t seem to make the bikes bright enough,” said James M. Barr, executive vice president at Huffy.
A few Asian manufacturers also have caught on to the American fad, and are just beginning to export to the United States low-priced cruisers that sell for about $10 less than American-made models.
But not everyone wants a new cruiser. Many owners want them old--very old.
At the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at Colorado State University, for example, the older --and more banged up--the bike, the better.
“It’s the only transportation I have,” said Robert Schenkenberger, president of the Fort Collins, Colo., fraternity. At the fraternity, 35 of its 45 members ride the bikes around campus.
“Some of the guys ride them to bars so they won’t get tickets for drunk driving,” Schenkenberger said. “We pick them up at junkyards for $20 or so.”
Used Bikes Popular
They can also be found at some used bike stores. “Our main problem is getting our hands on them,” said David Hudson, owner of Recycled Cycles in Fort Collins. “We sell about 15 a month, but that number is limited only by supply.”
At Goldust Enterprises, a bike shop in Huntington Beach, sales manager Blue Conforto said he sells six cruisers for each 10-speed. “The other day, a couple of guys brought in their 10-speeds and wanted to trade them in, even-up, for old cruisers.” Soon, Conforto said, he may convert the entire store into a shop for cruiser bikes.
In traffic-snarled beach cities, such as Santa Cruz, cruisers have evolved into veritable necessities for beach-going residents. “Many people here own two bikes,” explained Jack Dornbos, owner of Branciforte Bike Shop. “They take their cruisers to the beach and their 10-speeds to the mountains.”
Cruiser bicycles have also made their mark in Florida beach communities. Mark Gregoire, owner and president of Atlantic Bicycle of Broward Inc. in Fort Lauderdale, said that eight of every 10 bikes he sells are cruisers. “The middle-aged baby boomers are tired of bending over 10-speeds. You get on a cruiser and it’s like riding on a cloud.”
Behind every cruiser is the image of its owner. “Getting a one-speed clunker is a cultural gesture,” said John Rogers, co-owner of the Broadway Bike School in Cambridge, Mass. “You’re saying, this is all I want--even though I could have a lot more.”
One behavioral psychologist agrees that the current popularity of cruisers is hardly by accident.
Attracts Attention
“It’s a form of social chutzpah, “ said Ernest Dichter, a fashion psychologist and president of Ernest Dichter Motivations Inc., Peekskill, N.Y. “No one pays much attention to 10-speeds any more, so by riding a beat-up old bike you’re drawing attention. It’s exhibitionism--like a modern form of swallowing goldfish.”
Then again, it may not be all that complicated. In fact, as far back as the late 1960s, some Southland surfers cashed in their 10-speeds for cruisers, mainly because they got tired of changing flat tires, said Surfing magazine’s Pezman. “Besides,” he added, “10-speeds are too damn uncomfortable.” What’s more, cruisers are cheap. And the bikes are practical--surfers can ride them in the sand, then let them lie there whenever they spot a good set of waves.
“Think about it,” posed Ryan Owen, a 15-year-old Huntington Beach resident who owns a 3-year-old Schwinn cruiser. “Have you ever seen a surfboard rack on the back of a 10-speed?”
Cruiser bikes saw a slow rise in popularity during the 1970s. Some industry executives view the cruiser craze as a spin-off of the West Coast skateboard fad. Skateboarding, after all, is a form of dry land surfing. The cruiser bikes, with their smooth rides, are also regarded as close kin to surfing.
Pezman, the surfing expert, notes that the cruiser bikes first gained wide acceptance in Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, where long, flat bike paths make for ideal, one-speed conditions. It didn’t take long for bikers who pedaled from inland areas to notice the odd cruiser bikes--and eventually pick up on them.
Hot Rental Item
The bikes have also emerged as the most popular beach rental bicycles. The Old Mission Beach Bike Shop in San Diego has 25 rental bikes. Every one of them is a cruiser, said Andrew Lee, a salesman at the store.
“That’s all people seem to want,” Lee said. “Nothing else makes it down at the beach.” And the same people who rent them are showing up a few weeks later to buy them.
It has reached a point where cruisers have become so popular that people who bought them so that they wouldn’t have to lock them up now find they have to buy extra-hearty locks.
Bronwyn Markell, a Huntington Beach health food store manager, rides a 40-year-old cruiser that was originally her father’s. Although the bike looks its age, Markell said that she recently started locking it. “It seems the worse a bike looks, the more likely it is to get stolen,” she said.
Milo Overbay knows something about stolen cruisers.
Overbay owns Second Nature Bikes in Eugene, Ore. As a way of advertising to patrons that his store sells used cruisers, he recently bought a couple of “rust sculptures”--old cruisers he thought were too far gone for anyone to steal.
He placed them, unlocked, in a bike rack outside his front door and let them sit overnight.
Both bikes disappeared before the following day. “Whoever took the bikes has their work cut out for them,” he said. “Unless, of course, they sold them to some yuppies as antiques.”
