UK Bike Shop Chain Evans Cycles to Cut 300+ Jobs
British bike retailer chain Evans Cycles is expected to cut more than 300 jobs at its 55 stores, bringing its workforces from 813 down to 475 employees, despite the pandemic bike boom that has given the bike industry unprecedented levels of demand.
Evans Cycles was bought by controversial British billionaire Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group when the chain faced severe financial trouble in 2018. At the time, Evans Cycles employed 1,300 people, and the sale caused a stir about the loss of those jobs and other negative changes, even prompting a takeover of the Evans Cycles Instagram by a disgruntled employee. Now, Frasers Group aims to cut even more costs.
The remaining workers will have to reapply for their jobs, and managers will be expected to work 45 hours each week, up from 40, The Guardian reported. They will also be moved to zero-hour contracts or what Frasers Group calls “casual worker agreements,” meaning that they will not be guaranteed regular work hours. Frasers Group pledged to stop using zero-hour contracts five years ago after the group faced criticism from unions and members of parliament. However, nothing changed, and the issue remains polarizing.
Evans Cycles employees learned about these changes last week via an internal document. A note to staff read, “We cannot rely on old ways of running our business and we must adapt. These changes will look to address the cost of sales ratio in our stores and ensure that we are able to be more flexible with our cost base out of peak trading and during difficult trading periods.”
Frasers has not offered any comment on the matter.
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Sad times and I feel for the remaining staff. I had 7.5 years working for them and had a blast for the most part. Glad I left when I did.
The team who have gone to the other company you mention are some of the biggest cycling nerds i've known and should not be tarred with the same brush. The one in particular you mention is the guy who actually made Evans great before it was made bad by subsequent investors. (and no, I don't work for any of them)
Having sat in some of the meetings with Mike Ashleys brother (one of SDs directors) and members of their board when they took over, they have backtracked on every promise they made in said meetings.
Your account started out as a bit of a laugh but has since descended into some horrid far right, borderline abusive "thing", we get it, you got burned, but so did a lot of people. Don't drag decent people and companies into this sh1tshow, move on.
Frankly your derogatory term and the fact you reference one of the worst human beings about as inspiration for the account name just highlights my point above.
You don't know me, you didn't sit in the sports direct take over meetings and have no idea what was promised or meant to happen. I left 2 years ago as I could see the writing on the wall.
Feel free to spam every comment on here as before.
Night night.
Most extraordinary thing I've read in a while.
Good luck in the job market.
The irony of you moaning like this, the taunts, the derogatory comments, the negatives towards the guy who actually made Evans Great (massive fail with your username by the way, lol) is amazing.
With this silky smooth way of dealing with people you have, I'm surprised SD haven't snapped you up like a chicken nugget, nom nom nom.
And still no clue at all.
Finally something we agree on though, the meetings were useless.
You carry on being this utterly amazing ambassador for cycling, see how that works out.
But I suppose the saying goes, "If you remember the late 18th century, you weren't there maaaaaaaaan"
Until people vote with their wallets and boycott nothing will change.
In the case of Sports Direct as well, I think unfortunately they have such a stranglehold on the lower priced end of the market that those on lower incomes might really want to boycott, but really have limited other options.
As I say, no idea of any of this is true, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Totally agree though that asking those on low incomes to boycott a place that helps them save money isn’t realistic - the unfortunate truth is that that many are on low incomes because they work for places like this... never ending circle.
And without staff, what would he do? Run the businesses by himself? Use sense.
Don't get me wrong, this certainly sucks for those that are being let go, and I hope they find a new opportunity. But the market will adjust and so will the consumers and so will labor.
So what’s the solution? One state run anti-capitalist bike company? That worked great in the past...
Do you get tired of shitposting on leftist echochambers like reddit, so you just can't help yourself but to bring this bullshit here?
Capitalism does, in fact, work. If a smaller buisness gets out competed, the consumer, a.k.a the people who are buying the actual product wins, because they get the same good for a cheaper price. If there is substantial enough demand for a higher quality good, then there will be a market for it at a higher price. If a bike shop goes out of buisness, this doesn't change the demand, and the employees of said bike shop can find work elsewhere, especially if you are the owner because buisness ownership experience isn't a industry specific thing, and being able to actually run a buisness for some time is a very valuable skill.
The funniest part though is that as a leftist, you should be ideologically opposed to bike shops because they pay a certain amount to the factories for the bike, and then sell it at a higher price, which in your world is "theft".
End of the day, all of my LBS are all out busy and looking for more people, not laying people off. There's more people trying to get in the sport than ever. This to me sounds like a poorly thought out decision by a corporate management group, and somehow that's equated to capitalism being horrible.
If salaries are "raised to reasonable levels" then all of you would move over to the Rocky Mountain thread and start bitching about how expensive the bikes are.
I am not anti capitalist, it would be pretty hypocritical of me as I run a small business an use all of the ‘capitalist’ tools available to me to do so but does that mean as a result I need to make certain choices regarding staff pay and welfare?
The paradox of capitalism in this image is that in driving to achieve the lowest available cost of service and highest possible profit margin means a resultant ‘system’ that cannot sustain itself as people don’t have enough spare money to actually buy goods anymore (so the system throws credit at poor people, so they can buy clothes with 3 equal payments or get payday loans)
In short, capitalism as a broad definition is probably the best option available to society currently, it just needs to be regulated a little more fairly so everyone can benefit, not just those hard working stressed out billionaires.
- transfers vast amounts of wealth from poor to rich
- incentivises exploitation of people who have to sell their labour to make a living (i.e. most people)
- incentivises extraction of finite resources, causing ecological and environmental destruction
Etc.
Then yes, capitalism *does* work.
I am asking, do you think he is legally, morally or otherwise, obligated to employ people?
Do I think he is obligated, legally morally or otherwise to employ people? Yes, in some way to all of them.
the answer is, he does not have any obligation to employ people. What you are saying, makes him a slave. He is forced to do your bidding. He has every right to pack it up and fire everyone, sell the business and f*ck off to Monaco or somewhere. Then 100% of the employees are out of work.
It's the same as saying you have some "right" to health care. You absolutely do not, since that right can only be fulflilled by a human. Saying you have some right to their labor, is saying they are your slave. You are a puke if you honestly believe that.
a true capitalist society(neither of us live in one) would have no excess capacity. that is idiotic. If I have 50 orders for widgets, making 100 is ludicrous. If I do make 100 and am stuck with 50 widgets no one wants, that's my burden, but also my right to do with what I want. I don't owe anyone a widget becasue I have extra.
and ffs, please for the love of the baby jeebus, stop with the f*cking class warfare rhetoric. "tax cuts for the rich" you even have a shred of an idea what the "rich" pay in taxes? I will give you a hint...IT'S ALMOST ALL OF THEM! My wife and I aren't rich. we are high earners. wildly different things. Our tax bill, if it were someone's salary, would put that person in the top 5% of wage earners. that sound fair?
the top 10% of wage earners pay 90% of the income taxes in the US. the top 20% pay 96%! the top 1%? yeah, they pay 40% of all federal income taxes paid. the bottom 50% of all tax payers pay an effective tax rate of 0%. SO! you have a near even split of people pulling the f*cking wagon as you have along for to the ride. What happens when you push that burden so high on producers that they simply drop the yoke? you have an entire country full of deadbeats in a wagon going backwards down the hill.
So, instead of demonizing the people that own the capital, run this businesses, innovate and produce hundreds of millions of jobs, say thank you. With out the Steve Jobs, Elon Musks, and Richard Bransons of the world, we...neigh, the entire planet would be far, far worse off. Capitalism has lifted over 4 billion...thats nine zero, BILLION, people out of poverty in the last 50 years. 200 years ago, 90% of the planet lived in abject poverty. today it's less than 10% even with a population that's 400% higher. Capitalism did that. Business owners did that. Innovators did that. BILLIONAIRES DID THAT!
you know how I know you don't understand what running a business is really about, even though you proport to have one? It's that you either fail to see what the point of a "high profit margin" is or you are being purposefully obtuse and omiting it.
Any successful(I will leave you the possibilty that you run an unsuccessful business. It seems likely) business in a competitive market pushes to get costs down and gross margins up, for the express purpose of lowing prices to gain further market share. It takes about a 7th grade understanding of mathematics to know that lower net margins on higher volume sales makes more money than high margin and low volume.
Except it does not take just 7th grade understanding of mathematics, which is evident when you realise the ammount of physicists, mathematicians and engineers working in business and finance.
Don't over simplify the question at hand just to try and prove your point.
because that is the current amount I pay more than the average person. How am I getting equity?
Innovation has been increasing at ever increasing rates since the beginning of humanity. Capitalism has been around for very tiny fraction of that time. Capitalism is not responsible for increasing innovation.
Capitalism does create a lot of jobs, which might seem cool at first, but taking a deeper look at today's society reveals the existence of many bullshit jobs, and also an ever increasing amount of underpaid jobs as result of increasing alienation, as result of increasing specialization and automation of work, among other reasons.
Nowadays automation may even have negative effects in society, since it is now being used to increase capital, instead of being employed towards decreasing work time while making it more productive, as was the case in earlier human societies.
All "Steve Jobs, Elon Musks, and Richard Bransons" achievements rely on the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. That's how living in a society works. Working class people of today have no reason to thank them. Some might argue that we should even be unthankful to them because they have actually taken much more from society than they have given back, as is proven the ever increasing inequality, and also by the fact that being that rich is mostly luck driven (Since you and your family earn soo much you might be too disconnected from the reality of working class people to understand this, but i can elaborate further on this point if you please).
We make a very good profit margin on our products and we continue to grow at around 30% year on year, this year more and we have further invested to increase product line and capture more of the market as you say, it’s also improved the employee working environment too so that’s a bonus - we strive to be as efficient as possible, as environmentally friendly as possible and as ethically sound as possible all while ensuring business longevity and safety.
I have been doing this for 20 years, do you own a business, or are you involved in one in any way other than being perhaps a bean counter?
You see, if you make billions of pounds profit you don’t need to push your staff to the very edge of the working wage, do you? That’s called greed and exploitation my small minded little friend.
Maybe you are one of the strange individuals that like the idea of billionaires as you think one day you will be one? Well, you won’t.
Investing in society in such a way that creates more specialized and automated work is expensive, but in the end the incresed alienation of people from the value they produce still pays off for the capital.
Even if he pays 1500% more tax than the plebs he is still a penniless individual compared to those with actual wealth.
Some people are just obsessed with their ‘right’ to be mega wealthy without seeing they they are not and will never actually be, quite sad really.
This is not true.
Over 10% of American households are food insecure. The percentage is higher for households with children, so yes, milions of American children suffer from hunger. In most cases this is because people can't afford food.
Why? There are many reasons, but this is capitalism - people try to buy everything the cheapest possible, including labour of other people. With unregulated minimal wages, Amazon and the likes pay the least they can, and being monopolists, they dictate how the market looks like. So even if people work hard, they can't sustain themselves and their families. Then other citizens and government (from tax money) have to help - food banks, or sorts of relief systems - so citizens pay because large companies are not regulated and can't be made to pay themselves for the work they benefit from. Effectively, government ends up subsidising the large companies by keeping their employees alive.
www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
foodfoundation.org.uk/new-food-foundation-data-sept-2020
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_Kingdom
You are an ignorant, arrogant piece of shit, learn to at least read first - From the website given above:
Food insecurity here is based on an affirmative response to one of three questions:
In the last 12 months, did you or other adults in the household ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food?
In the last 12 months, were you ever hungry, but didn’t eat, because there wasn’t enough money for food?
In the last 12 months did you or other adults in your household ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn’t enough money for food?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-hour_contract
"The term 'zero-hour contract' is primarily used in the United Kingdom"
Kiwis have banned them: "A bill outlawing zero-hour contracts in New Zealand was unanimously passed on 10 March 2016"
Fixed that for you.
and there are people who actually believe we live in free market capitalism! at this stage its an utter fallacy. i'm just waiting for some lunatic to say that the solution is communism lol.
Except that is literally the opposite of what the EC does. If anything, it makes people in small states more equal than large states. This was a compromise based on slave states wanting power, so I wouldn't push this too much. I live in the "middle" and my state is set up in the same way, with small areas getting more power than the large areas. Guess what they focus on? Super regressive policies that hurt the population. They are literally trying to make it harder to get ballot initiatives going so we can't pass medicial marijuana, even though most of the state wants it.
Just as a side note I mostly agree with you. I think that capitalism tends to gravitate towards corruption because its a natural commodification of power and privilege. Cronyism is an unfortunate side effect of power dynamics.... I personally think that capitalism has a great carrot but the stick has been shrunken to the point that the punishments are not proportional to crimes, especially for the powerful. And that needs to be fixed first.
I think people need to remember context and that everything is relative. If someone thinks capitalism is broken, I say "compared to what?".
I wish these employees the best of luck in finding new employment, but this isn't a sign that capitalism is broken, rather a management team full of @ssholes. I've been in their position and have been fired/quit to move on to greener pastures.
I am stoked to ride soon, though.
Our only real hope is the next generation rebels against this feckless Millenial generation and values freedom, liberty and the innate right of man to be independant.
I did tell them that evans has a pretty poor rep in the uk and is going bust. They said its not in their plans to change it anytime soon. More fool them. They have awesome bikes but could sell 10x more of they werent exclusive to evans
People don`t like to take the slightest L.
This is his business and he can run it how he wants. Funny how everybody knows all the margins and bottom lines for Evans cycles all the sudden...
We should just go ride our bikes man.
Saying this, even before Sports Direct took over, Evans were wasting money everywhere, more concerned about how their stores look like, than their staff, losing so many passionate and knowledgeable people, because they did not want to pay them just a little bit more. Always just above the minimum wage. London living wage? So not make me laugh.
Worked with amazing people there, made friends for life, learned a lot and had a great time working for Evans, but the patent was sick a long time before the takeover.
That said, you’re right: the patent was sick before the takeover. We lived in a place 20ft sq and I remember tearing a hole in the corner of my pay envelope (to empty out the coins) while my wife put an extra £100 on it for rent. In the 10months I worked there I never saw my Evans pay check.
Hope the affected staff find great jobs.
They will also be moved to zero-hour contracts or what Frasers Group calls “casual worker agreements,” meaning that they will not be guaranteed regular work hours. Frasers Group pledged to stop using zero-hour contracts five years ago after the group faced criticism from unions and members of parliament. However, nothing changed, and the issue remains polarizing.
My point is that just being a rider-owned LBS doesn't indicate employment practices that are one shred better than those of this shtty UK megastore. A consumer has to ask how they treat their workers before running to social media to upvote the LBS. I've worked in three shops, each totally different
I just thought it was funny that some of the points you were making, were exactly mentioned in the article...to where it seemed you didn't read the article.
No matter what...It's a big club-and you and I ain't in it. I forget who said that---but he said some other funny stuff to. ;0
And look how that's going
That's so factually inaccurate it's hard to know where to begin. To start with, Evans isn't a LBS, it's a nationwide chain. Mike Ashley wouldn't own Evans if it wasn't a high street brand.
Online retailers and large, nationwide chain stores (Evans, J E James, Halfords - in spite of their reputation) have much more buying power than the small LBS.
The reason why they are so large is that they are able to buy their stock in bulk (think tyres in their thousands, chains/inner tubes etc. in their tens of thousands - per order). The more stock they buy, the less it will cost per item. There is no way an LBS can compete with this, they don't have the resources or the warehousing capability. If a LBS were to do the same, it would either have to spend all its capital on buying a shit-tonne of stock, buying bigger premises to keep that stock in and then sell at a smaller profit, or buy less stock at the higher price and charge more. If they only bought the amount of stock they could afford but charged less to try and keep up with the likes of Evans, CRC/Wiggle etc, there wouldn't be enough profit in the sales to y'know, pay its staffs' wages. Or the rent on the shop premises.
The moral of the story is that if people really wanted to help local bike stores, stop buying from big companies and buy stuff from the little guy.
Why would you buy form a crap shop that give poor service, sorry but they have got themselves into this mess
The chain took a massive nose dive when it got bought out and taken over by a chav!
Such a shame!
This business was taken ove by Mike Rice the man who made Evans into the machine it is today. He’s doing the same with Balfes as he did with Evans. Make it a massive money making entity to suck as much money from the industry as possible then leave to let the ramians fall into chaos.
They’re the total embodiment of the word leach. They destroy LBS shops with their vast buying power and have no care or love for the cycling community just to take from it as much as they can.
They open shops in close proximity to long standing community shops and they fall because they just can’t compete with price.
Evans is the front of the problem. Mike Rice and his foundations are the real issue with Mike Ashley just following the preset left by Mr Rice, both absolute dooshbags.
Until the industry gets some morals and respects the LBS for its support to the community and the industry over these massive money machines then nothing will change.
We all need to act by not shopping with them.
The new owner must be one Trump fanboy following the same philosphies to success?
It's pretty funny that working forty five hours as a salaried manager is a thing. Where I come from, if you're salaried they basically own you, an extra five hours is nothing.
Well, all you UK folks best stay where you are, don't even think about coming to the States cuz work requirements here are much stricter and employers are far more cut throat.
Nice way to support your LBS