April 13, 2021

A business known for selling bikes is expanding about as close to the Sioux Falls bike trail as you can get.

Spoke-N-Sport will be opening a second Sioux Falls store at the former Get-N-Go on South Cliff Avenue in front of Spencer Park.

The dog park there sits adjacent to the city’s recreation trail, where Spoke-n-Sport owner Chad Pickard said “it makes a lot of sense for us to have a bike store on the bike trail.”

Cyclists will be able to easily access service or parts, and eventually the hope is to “do a ton of rentals out at that location,” Pickard said. “There’s room for that at some point.”

That likely will come after it becomes easier to stock inventory of bikes. The plan is to open the new location with bikes sometime in June, but that will depend on inventory arriving as planned in the coming months and not selling out before it even arrives.

“This year likely will be a weird transition year because of the inventory we can get,” Pickard said, adding what’s coming in now was ordered in August 2020.

“We have a lot of people traveling from Omaha, Minneapolis, just traveling to Sioux Falls because they can’t get anything. We field a lot of phone calls from even larger metros – New York, Chicago, LA, Seattle – people just trying to find anything and everything.”

While the plan is for the new location to have bikes when it opens, “we want to focus on a cyclist who is looking for a better experience,” Pickard said. “That’s obviously different for everybody, but we will carry some higher-end bikes, bikes that can hold up riding at Tuthill. They’re made to go the distance, and you’ll have it four or five years and love every minute of it.”

The new store also will have biking gear, bottled water, water bottles and disc golf supplies.

“The gas station sells more discs than any retailer,” Pickard said. “And we’ll pick up skateboards. We’ll have a small sampling there. We’ve always done them at our Brookings store, but with the pandemic, people have had a need to do stuff outside, so we’re bringing in good adjacent activities.”

He’s planning to hire another full-time salesperson, full-time mechanic and a couple of part-time sales positions.

“We have about half our staff hired,” he said. “It’s really hard to hire right now, but we do need more. We pay really good wages for our industry. My employees are full time with full health insurance, IRA and paid time off.”

And they will be year-round jobs, especially because there are more changes ahead for Spoke-n-Sport. The Minnesota Avenue store will begin carrying ski and snowboarding merchandise later this fall.

“So the extra room will be nice,” Pickard said. “We can focus on the mountain bike trails over by Tuthill, there are some other trails southwest of Tomar Park, so we’re going to try and focus our winter biking needs at the Cliff Avenue store.”

While the Cliff Avenue deal still isn’t fully finalized, Get-N-Go has closed and demolished the gas pumps.

“We have a store where we’re pretty sure we’ll be able to capture all the business down the street. We have a good loyal customer base, and they will go over to Cliff and 57th, so to be honest, it seemed like the right thing to do,” district manager James Dean said.

“And once we found out who was looking at it, it’s just really good for the community in general.”

The location used to be a 7-Eleven and Taylor’s Pantry.

The branch of Sioux Falls Federal Credit Union will continue to share the building with Spoke-n-Sport for the remainder of the lease.