Cities
The quiet economics of repair
A bike workshop in Leipzig fixes 3,000 bikes a year and throws away almost nothing. What its numbers say about the shops we keep and the ones we lose.
By Clara Neumann, city editor
Oct 21, 20269 min read
Karim Haddad opens the workshop at eight, but the first customer is usually waiting at a quarter to. It is a woman with a child seat that came loose on the way to the nursery, and she needs it fixed before nine. He does it on the pavement in four minutes and charges her nothing.
1Free quick fixes take about six percent of the working day. Haddad counts them in a notebook and calls them the cheapest advertising in the city.
That small gesture is, in a way, the whole business model. Most of what the workshop earns comes from people who first came for something free. Half of them come back within a year for a service that costs real money, and almost all of them tell someone else.
2From the workshop’s own records for 2025, 1,240 first visits and 618 returns within twelve months.
Parts, not products
The back room holds about 9,000 parts, sorted into drawers that Haddad labeled by hand. Some of them are older than he is. A bike that a larger shop would replace for 600 euros often needs a 14 euro bearing and an hour of patience, and patience is the part that is hard to buy.
3A new bearing for a common hub costs between 9 and 18 euros. The labor is billed at 52 euros an hour.
Repair shops like his used to be on every second corner. The ones that are left share three habits. They keep their rent low, they keep a stock of used parts, and they keep their prices visible on a board by the door, so nobody has to ask.