“We’re the new toilet paper and everyone wants a piece,” Grant Kaplan, manager of Giant Sydney, a bike store in Sydney’s CBD, tells Guardian Australia.
“We can’t keep up with sales. Literally the phone is ringing nonstop,” he laughs, as another call came through in the background.
At first, casual employees, such as Giant Sydney’s Sean Marshall, were worried the Covid-19 restrictions would see them out of work.
But within a week of the state lockdown, Kaplan was offering his casuals extra shifts, saying if anything they were “short-staffed given the upturn in bike sales”.
The store has had to stop servicing bikes – typically a major source of revenue – because its mechanics are overrun with putting together customers’ new purchases.