The Great Hipster Decline

Sorry Hipsters, it seems your becoming extinct. Not as a culture, or anti-culture, or whatever the heck hipsters are.  Just the rest of societies willingness to listen to anything you say, pay for anything you want to do, or deal with you at all.   Specifically, the world of cycling sends a bicycle type back to its origins.  Your flagship transportation, the hipster fixie, is officially dying, single speed fixed gears will return to tracks and training as God intended.  .  I come to this epiphany from a simple social gauge...

Yesterday, while visiting the great wal of mart, I found the bike pictured at left.  Yeah, they have been selling them online, and maybe even in the larger city stores, but not as far off in the boonies as I reside.  To have this being sold in my nearby Walmart means that sales have dropped enough to warrant last ditch effort distribution.

The town that the Walmart is in is not a large city by any means, and most bike sales run through two bike shops.  The mart merely handles the residual bike sales to kids bikes, and to those that "hope" to ride more than once a year and impulse buy.  I'm sure there are some case examples, but lets keep it somewhat simple.

With the Tech college, I'm sure that there is one ass clown that has drooled on this fixie.  With visions of growing a beard and sporting flannel above skinny jeans.  In this area that combo would make him a hood ornament on a camo-truck.  We do not have a huge population of hipsters here, nor will the rednecks allow it.  Thank you rednecks.

No Pizza delivery hipsters on fixies here,
we step it up a notch and throw our pies in a VW with a moose humping it,
then have a moose drive it.

So why are there few hipsters in my area?  There are some, but they haunt other nearby towns in small numbers and hide in the basements of relatives homes to ply their hipster witchcraft.  Only in "The Dells"  do they appear with any confidence.   The reason for "The Dells"  being a safe zone is the high population of tourists, college kids, and the European imported labor force. Given the hipster overflow from the capitol area "Madison" to the "Dells", it is not a problem that requires spraying, or traps to remove the hipsters yet.  But they do exist there.  Go to the Starbucks sometime, and you can watch a few wander in and linger as if trying to start a hangout.

Hipster beard kozy

The Euro's even seem to regard them differently towards the end of summer.  Hipsters represent the thing they came here to leave behind.  When they arrive in the spring, the Euro's look a little hipsterish, by fall, they look like typical late teens American clean cuts with awesome water park tans.  That says something.    
Other towns around this area are just too rural to host hipster parasites.  Coffee shops are diner style and are full of business types, farmers and families. We do not have food co-ops or vegan anything unless it is the "Corn and Tater Fest".  Those that sport flannel and beards are hunters, certainly not hipsters.

Is that Amish Elijah Wood?

Oops, not just hunters, I forgot the Amish dudes, Amish dudes are everything a hipster claims to be and want in practice and principle except the whole religious, work and technology thing.  Natural food, co-ops, fixie buggies, no carbon footprint, hairy women, the beards, etc..  trade the cotton knit with straw, and you have a Hipish.or Amishster or whatever.  

The hipsters will be needing new transportation which I address here, but the obvious point is that with fixies showing up in Walmart, they have become too mainstream to be hipsteriffic statements let alone settle well with the hipster anti-mart view.  It is a matter of time now, and maybe we will witness a mass hipster exodus into the sea.  Like lemmings since land is to conventional.  Fingers crossed.

More on the fall of the hipster?

Hipster Apocalypse~the PCPRPC Blog
Fixie The Hipsters~the AntMill Blog