The pandemic-fueled craze for exercise bikes like Peloton — with on-screen trainers spurring on locked-down couch potatoes to feel the burn — has apparently ran its course.
Instead, treadmills — with the raging coaches replaced in some cases by streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video — have regained a foothold in many households after Peloton’s implosion, industry experts told The Post.
Lou Lentine — chief executive of exercise equipment company Echelon Fit, which sell both treadmills and stationary bikes — projects a 40% increase in treadmill sales in the fourth quarter compared to a year ago.
Peloton also sells both types of exercise equipment, but does not break out sales figures.
“You don’t need a coach to tell you to work out harder every day,” Lentine said. “People want to get their 30 minutes of cardio in but they also want to watch the latest Netflix show.”
The evidence has been borne out in sales figures and searches for the competing in-home machines over the past year, according to Jungle Scout, a data and analytics platform for ecommerce sellers on Amazon.com.
Treadmills sales have soared 99% from last year, compared to a 3% drop in stationary bike sales, according to Jungle Scout, which cited data through Aug. 26.
What’s more, Amazon searches over that span that include the word ‘treadmill” dwarf those for “exercise bike” — 106,087 a week to 35,303, according to Jungle Scout’s data.
“Peloton made bikes trendy, but now that its marketing machine has quieted down, treadmills are hotter than ever,” Lentine said.
“Customers were brainwashed to buy bikes,” Lentine added, pointing out that treadmills have always outnumbered bikes in gyms.
The Chattanooga, Tenn.-based company’s treadmills, which start at $1,300 and can cost as much as $4,000, are sold at Walmart, Costco, Dick’s Sporting Goods and on Amazon. Peloton’s treadmills start at around $3,000.
Echelon plans to launch five new treadmills at different price points with different bells and whistles over the next six months, Lentine said.
They will include models that can stream Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video along with news providers, as well as offering Zoom capabilities as more workers shift to a hybrid schedule following the pandemic.
“We want to see whether people can do a Zoom call while they are (working out),” Lentine said.
By contrast, sales of Echelon’s line of exercise bikes have stagnated.
“We are heavily stocked on bikes,” Lentine said. “We are not putting in a lot of new orders for bikes.”
Echelon and other exercise equipment makers are still absorbing a glut of bike inventory built up during the pandemic when demand soared.
The downshift back toward treadmills by fitness buffs comes amid Peloton’s spectacular downfall after a spate of bad publicity that included product recalls and lawsuits linked to customer injuries – including the death of a child.
Its stock price closed Friday at $6.50, plummeting from $160 a share during the heights of the pandemic.
Last year, Peloton was forced to slash costs and laid off more than 5,000 employees. Its founder and CEO John Foley stepped down and it recalled its original bike because the seat post was breaking unexpectedly.
In its most recent quarter, Peloton reported that its subscribers declined by 29,000 due to the recall.
The company launched an ‘entertainment’ option on its screens this summer, equipping them with Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and YouTube and it has been testing other streaming providers like Disney+, Apple TV+ and HBO Max.
