As soon as
Lucky Duck Bicycle Cafe in Oakland Chinatown reopened for foot traffic during a COVID lull, I hustled in and bought three King cages for my Trek 720. I knew they'd need any sales they could get, having been closed for everything but repairs for over a year. I knew they stocked the cages at the same price King charges on their website (they went up from $18 to $20 during the pandemic, for the same reasons everything got more expensive), so it was a chance to buy a well-made product and throw a little money a local retailer's way.
Lucky Duck is also a retail outlet for
Ruthworks Bags; I met Eli Rodriguez there once, when he was running some kind of shop sale of a bunch of bags. LD also stocks Rene Herse tires at MSRP; if I'm paying retail instead of buying used tires, I buy from them. Again, the manufacturer gets their money, the retailer gets a sale, the retailer gets a chunk taken out of their minimum required order from the manufacturer, and it encourages the retailer to keep stocking the products I use.
Peter "buy the change you want to see in the world" Adler
excessively overthinking his consumer behavior in
Berkeley, CA/USA