[zbentley]

Hmmm. A lot of this rings true, but a couple of things seem to indicate to me that brick-and-mortar bike shops may continue to exist over time:

Bikes are an interesting confluence of both very personal (i.e. the style/"feel" of someone's new bike is important, or the "fit" if they're buying with a bit more experience), very expensive (relatively), and very physically large (and hard to assemble).

That means that people will want to try out bikes before they buy, since the investment is substantial. Bikes need to be assembled to try out. If a brick-and-mortar store went online-only, it might be a substantial outlay for them to ship bikes to people to try out, and a hassle for folks to assemble them before trying them (unless they were shipped assembled, which is a much larger container). It seems like that might be cost/difficulty preventative for moving a lot of merchandise compared with the benefits of a showroom. Sure, bike stores might have to become more showroom-only, but I don't think they're going away.