Google marks bike stores as closed

At the beginning of the coronavirus restrictions, bike store managers were amazed when they looked at their own Google entry. In many places, the search engine giant had marked specialist bike stores in Google search in red and bold with the tag "Temporarily closed". This in no way corresponded to the facts, as the bike stores' workshops were open. This is because on March 16, the Federal Council decided that - in order to ensure supplies for the entire population - workshops for means of transportation should remain open. This means that the workshops of Swiss bike stores can and should be open and operational, while their salesrooms do not have to be accessible or closed. It sometimes took several days for the misleading "Temporarily closed" tags to disappear from Google entries. Sometimes it helped if the bike store managers edited the "Google My Business" entries themselves. Sometimes it only helped to wait until the supposed artificial intelligence automatically corrected the entries.

A threat of a supply bottleneck with bike parts?

After Google used false information to make it more difficult to get into the bike store, there is now a threat of a supply bottleneck in the middle of the restriction phase. Swiss Post can no longer cope with the massive increase in parcel volumes due to online orders and, in consultation with the Swiss Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (DETEC), is imposing a quota on the parcels that are forwarded to its major customers. This also applies to the Swiss Shimano distributor Fuchs-Movesa, which delivers its parcels to bike stores by post.Velosuisse, the association of Swiss bicycle importers, announced via its media representative Martin Platter: "The recently decided parcel quotas at Swiss Post are hitting the bicycle trade hard. This is because DETEC's restriction makes no distinction between systemically relevant businesses and purely consumer-oriented online trade. Systemically important domestic businesses and micro-businesses are at a massive disadvantage compared to large foreign online retailers."Platter also announced that the temporary introduction of parcel quotas, which will be forwarded by Swiss Post, could lead to bottlenecks in the supply of spare parts from the week before Easter. Fuchs-Movesa, the Swiss importer of bicycle component market leader Shimano and the largest e-bike drive manufacturer Bosch, has always maintained its cooperation with Swiss Post despite higher shipping costs.Richard Merz, Managing Director of Fuchs-Movesa, is correspondingly disappointed by DETEC's decision, which now effectively punishes this loyalty to the state-owned company: "From one day to the next, we have to halve our daily number of 1,200 parcels to 600. DETEC is thus jeopardizing the supply of spare parts to our 1,700 bicycle dealers, who have actually been tasked by the Federal Council with ensuring the mobility of the population even during the Covid-19 emergency measures."

Merz cannot understand why DETEC does not differentiate between systemically important businesses and purely online retail that only serves consumption when it comes to parcel quotas. He says: "Once again, foreign online retailers in particular are being favored, while we in Switzerland have to struggle with restrictions. The ones who suffer are the small bike repair shops that can't do their work due to a shortage of spare parts." He asks: "Why doesn't Swiss Post simply concentrate on the domestic market? Then you wouldn't ride many SMEs to the wall during the crisis". Merz has already reacted to the measures taken by Swiss Post and promptly initiated a partnership with parcel specialist DHL for his company.

Swiss Post reports on the situation in a press release: "On the one hand, parcel volumes in particular are increasing sharply by around 40 percent, reaching peaks such as those seen in the run-up to Christmas. At the same time, there are fewer employees available, as around 2100 of them are unable to be at work. This may be because they belong to a risk group, are looking after children, are in quarantine or are ill themselves. At the same time, many processes are slowing down due to the need to comply with hygiene regulations and social distancing, for example in sorting. International letter and parcel traffic is also affected by some restrictions due to the stagnation in the international flow of goods."

Zurich Office for Economy and Labor does not want Sunday work in bike shops

Merz is not the only one who is annoyed by the inflexible attitude of the government and authorities, Velosuisse continues. Zurich bicycle dealer Thomas Ernst applied to the Zurich Office of Economy and Labor for temporary Sunday work. He wanted to better distribute the high workload with the already shrunken team in two-shift operation across all days of the week in order to reduce the risk of infection in the workshop. The employees would have agreed. Ernst would have paid the usual wage supplement on Sundays. However, the office rejected the request on the grounds that the Labor Act and the associated ordinances would continue to apply unchanged during the Covid-19 measures.