Technical Difficulties: “The race to the bottom.”

Technical Difficulties chronicles the trials and tribulations of Antony de Heveningham, who we’ll let introduce himself:

“A bit about me: I’m 36 years old (still not sure how that happened), and grew up in the mountain biking desert of Lincolnshire, but I’ve been a resident of Bristol for the last decade or so. I’ve had a singlespeed phase, a cyclocross phase and a bike polo phase. I’m still waiting for a being good at riding phase. I can be found out in the woods patching up trails, or indoors moaning about people moaning on the internet.”

In his first column for Singletrack, Antony tackles the desperate search for barginz, barginz, barginz…

For something that contains a fair amount of the total of human knowledge and experience, the internet can be a depressingly predictable place. And nowhere is it more predictable than when attention is drawn to a relatively expensive piece of bicycling equipment. Sooner, not later, a particular sub-species of the genus internetus commentardus pipes up with a well-worn phrase: one or more of ‘What a ripoff’, ‘Does it do the pedalling for you?’, or the simple, straightforward ‘How much?!’

In the drudgeful everyday world, too, the value of kit is constantly questioned. Who, on revealing the price of a mid-range mountain bike to some colleagues, hasn’t been subjected to the cliché ‘You could get a car for that!’ – a phrase which conveniently misses out salient adjectives like ‘decade-old’ and ‘knackered’.

Wily man-bears, smashing apart the hive of the internet to drink the sweet honey of bargains

It’s got to the point where some reviewers routinely go overboard with justifications for an item’s price, piling on phrases like ‘for a X of this quality’ at the end of the article like they’re delivering a load of coal. So I think it’s time to consider the natures of cost and value (no, they’re not the same thing) in more depth.

In the absence of genuine challenge in much of our lives, many people now regard shopping as the new hunting and gathering. They style themselves as wily man-bears, smashing apart the hive of the internet to drink the sweet honey of bargains. To be successful at the game you only have to pay less than everyone else for a given product (or one that looks like it), and you can happily ignore other factors like time, customs duties and breaking the thing as you try to fit it. Local bike shop? You can get that much cheaper online. Big name UK online retailer? There’s somewhere in Germany knocking it out for way less. Online shops? Pfft, I buy all my stuff direct from China.

There’s something that makes me deeply uncomfortable about this race to the bottom. I wonder how many of the bargain hunters out there have ever tried making something themselves – a bike frame, a table, a loaf of bread – and realised the commitment required. Not just the time to do it, but the time to do it well. The stuff that I think of as the ‘scribbling on the back of an envelope phase’, but which traditional marketers are more likely to refer to as R&D. It’s an investment in the truest sense of the word, and skimping on it isn’t good. At some point the bargains become too blatant, the paint on the frame too thin, and the pleasure of having a few extra quid in your pocket turns sour.

Imagine if the Philosophy of Supreme Cheapness applied to other areas of your life

That’s also assuming a completely level playing field, where all companies can jostle equally for your attention. Is the game straight? Ask your local dairy farmer. Or just imagine if the Philosophy of Supreme Cheapness applied to other areas of your life. Maybe someone else would be doing your job for £5 an hour less, or your family would have deserted you for another provider who earns a bit more.

If you’re thinking what a naive fool I am, and how this is already the way of the world, slow your roll. The race to the bottom is happening, but the brakes aren’t all the way off, yet. Wholesale job outsourcing; collapsing garment factories; these things are still considered by society to be thoroughly effed-up. And yet the extreme tendencies of the system that creates them are defended, supposedly because it gives consumers the best value.

Value for money is a highly subjective term, just notional bits of paper in a virtual bank vault. A price on its own is meaningless when a tenner is an unimaginable amount of disposable income to some people, but a day’s parking charge for others. We need to ask other questions too. How often do you purchase that particular thing? How much do you use it? Are you wearing out a headset or a pair of cranks every couple of weeks? Is there some sad sub-strata of riding clothes in your drawers which are still perfectly serviceable, yet somehow never get worn these days?

Borrow something, fix something, raid a friend’s shed for spares and build what you need

Outdoor industry legend Yvon Chouinard put his finger on an uncomfortable truth recently, when he said it’s not enough for businesses to have the environmental credentials any more, they really need to make consumers question whether they need something in the first place. Makes sense to me. Apart from the mullering we’re dishing out to our friendly, habitable planet, this philosophy also points the way to avoiding the sad descent of once-desirable products into just ‘stuff’, then finally into clutter, to be purged the next time we have a Life Laundry moment. There are other ways to get value besides scouring the sale section: you could borrow something, fix something, raid a friend’s shed for spares and build what you need.

I’m not advocating that we all stop buying goods and go and live in a hand-knitted yurt, though. Some things are just intrinsically poor value: the 25-minute hot air balloon ride for my girlfriend’s birthday, the arcade games I played as a teenager. It doesn’t make them not worth doing, or mean that the people purchasing them were duped by marketing.

Perhaps a better way of thinking of it is enabling. What does the thing you’re buying enable you to do? If it’s a question of shortcutting your way to an experience that you’d have anyway if you put the time and effort in – those lightweight wheels which could let you climb like a particularly fractious goat – what value do you place on your time, and would it be such a bad thing if you rode more instead? If, on the other hand, it makes the difference between having an enjoyable day out and a cold, mechanical-ridden, miserable one, go ahead. One of the beauties of the bike industry is that you’re probably giving some of your money to like-minded folk who you might meet on the hill one day.

In the meantime, I’m ruefully eyeing the £50 dropper post I impulse-bought on eBay, (non-functional out of the Jiffy bag, in case you’re curious) and wondering if I should have invested a bit more…