[Closed] Dear "The Bike Industry", please have a word with yourself.....

When I was a lad I could by a can of coke and a mars bar for less than 50p

And all this were fields, etc...

Nicolai Helius in XO and Hope wheels for £2.5k

No carbonz, no care

A proper rant would have RANDOM CAPitals and punctuation<:"{. Also speeling mistaks!

HTH.

😉 😉

supply and demand. If you don't want it don't buy it. I'm not saying im happy paying that sort of money but someone is, otherwise they wouldn't have a business

Normal person thinks £500 on mountain bike is mad.
Person interested in bikes thinks £500 is OK and £1500 is mad.
Bike fanatic thinks £1500 is OK and £7000 is mad.
Professional rider thinks £7000 is OK and having hairy legs is mad.
Person with high disposable income thinks he needs pro ride. Shaves legs too.

2/10

"As far as I can see PlanetX are the only ones being vaguely sensible. "

Today's "best thing on the interweb" winner is...

pussywillow called, he wants his rant-fodder back 😉

And if anyone from the bike industry is reading this, please could you persuade anyone who persists with using the term "colorway"(sic) to please shoot themselves.

bigblackshed 😆

I was just in Evans in Leeds and was looking at the Norco Sight 3 SE, £1800, looks like a great bike for that price as well.

There are some ridiculous prices out there but there are a lot of reasonable ones too. Just be sensible, I would be no better on the 7k mutha luvva, than I would be on a £1500 'cheapo'!!

Eh?

Dunno how you had ordered the listing, but I have just had a look on the Evans site & looking at 'mountain bikes' and sorting by 'price-Low to High', there are 28 pages.
Crossing the £1k barrier occurs at page 11 , your custom Nicolai barrier (£2500) occurs on page 20 and crossing your £7k barrier takes until the last bike on page 27. and page 28 has only 3 bikes on it.
So it's not exactly like £7k bikes are the norm.

Pretty sure you've got your knickers in a knot over nothing......

Nice things in 'costing money' shocker....

In the end of the day the 7k carbon enve wheeled bikes ate the Ferrari's of the bike world look and admire but it's not gonna happen! But we do seem to get less bang for your buck than five years ago tbh group set wise certainly.

I take it you think that's dear then...

Where does it say you HAVE to pay that much for the bike?

Much the same as a Bugatti Veyron costs £1,000,000+, yet a ford focus can do many of the same things a Veyron can. Okit wont look, sound or drive as well, but you can still stop, start and go shopping at Tesco's in one.

Exotic bikes have always been around. Spesh used to do CF Stumpy Epics which had Ti lugs and CF tubes, they were £3k 20 years ago. Think of them as "look this is the pinnacle of what we can do, if money were no object". Its not like you cant pick up a BSO for £50 still is it.

When I was a lad I could by a can of coke and a mars bar for less than 50p

Hell's teeth. I'm starting to get this inflation thing, now. It was way under 25p when I were a lad 🙄 😉

As far as I can see PlanetX are the only ones being vaguely sensible.

They seem to be able to make a healthy profit on brilliantly specced, well designed, superbly reviewed bikes for less than half the price of many of the 'competition'.

What I don't understand is that some of these £6-7k bikes don't even seem to be cheaper than buying a frame and building it up

eg I can't see how this could be £6k given a £1700 frame

http://www.shopgiant-bicycles.co.uk/3302/products/2013-giant-xtc-advanced-sl-29er-0-carbon-performance-mountain-bike.aspx

So you had 16 pages of sub 1k bikes to get your kicks on?

& when you got to the last page you was surprised it was an expensive bike?

Things have gone up, but they have not changed.

But we do seem to get less bang for your buck than five years ago tbh group set wise certainly.

what I dont understand is why release next years bike now, except it's not released because it will not be available to dealers until February and will have sold out in March.

What I don't understand is that some of these £6-7k bikes don't even seem to be cheaper than buying a frame and building it up

eg I can't see how this could be £6k given a £1700 frame

Conversely, look at the Morewood Kalula: The complete bike retails for £3600. If you bought the frame, the forks, and the rear shock separately it would cost nearly £4000 so buying the complete bike you get the rest of the very good kit for free, plus £400 towards it.

Hi someone told me last year(can't remember who) that top end bike stuff was going to go up by a fair bit this year,I think about 35% was suggested due to increased production costs,
As for the Mars bar and coke I would have got change from 20p, I can just about remember a tanners worth of chips..2.5p in new money. And we had a choice of two sizes of wheel back then. 26x1.3/8"(650b) in newspeak or 27x1.1/4" which I believe is nowadays called 29er.
But no one got wages like a lot get these days.
Currently my dole money doesn't purchase much in the way of XTR, Chris King etc.
well that's my two pennyworth,(been devalued a bit over the years)
Cheers Kit 🙂

I remember in about 1997 the exotic high-end bikes being £4k. Plugged that into an inflation calculator and that came back with £6168.40 - so not far off. I'd bet the high-end of now is many orders of magnitude better than back in the 90s too.

Average salary back then was £14367, now it's £24452. So it would have taken Mr Average 3.3 months of pre-tax salary to buy his dream bike. Now it would be 3.4 months of the same to buy that £7k bike.

The mid-range, the stuff that is reasonably affordable to the average person, has never been better and even that would be preferable to the ultra-bling of a decade ago.

This is the same inflation (of both wages and goods) than means a mid-range diesel hatchback now costs in excess of £20k.

What I don't understand is that some of these £6-7k bikes don't even seem to be cheaper than buying a frame and building it up

Yeah, this is the stuff that baffles me the most, used to be the case that FULL bikes were drastically better value. Really bad example, bit of an easy target (even though I own one):

http://www.orangebikes.co.uk/bikes/five_pro/

So we've got a £1500 frame, £330 groupset (Merlin), £250 wheelset (and I'm being generous given those rims), £150 finishing kit (which is even more generous), £400 fork. The remaining £400 for them to build it?

I'm not convinced components have hugely gone up in price, just seems to be full bikes taking the p.

[url= http://www.evanscycles.com/products/specialized/carve-pro-2013-mountain-bike-ec042223 ]http://www.evanscycles.com/products/specialized/carve-pro-2013-mountain-bike-ec042223[/url]

M4 being their cheaper, older alloy. £300 groupset, £300 forks, own brand finishing kit...errr £1000 frame!

And if anyone from the bike industry is reading this, please could you persuade anyone who persists with using the term "colorway"(sic) to please shoot themselves

+1000

Almost as bad as the proliferative use of "bespoke" & "artisan"

Yep new bike prices are ridiculous. I would never buy anything new when the used market is so good at the minute. My whole bike probably cost about a grand but the spec is way ahead of what you'd get for that new, and will probably outlast it as its made of better kit!

Almost as bad as the proliferative use of "bespoke" & "artisan"

Bloke I used to work for thought "bespoke" meant "put spokes in".

"I'm going to go bespoke the wheel"
"Your wheel is bespoked, I just need to true it up"

"Artisan" just means you're going to get splinters off it.

"Artisan" just means you're going to get splinters off it.

If applied to food, it means it has one or more pubes in it.

If applied to beer, you won't pass anything solid for a week.

Bloke I used to work for thought "bespoke" meant "put spokes in".

It bloody well should do - I shall start using that immediately.

Pretty sure in 2005 a top end Scott MC Ltd (eg top end but not exactly boutique) was £5000

7k 8 years later for a Carbon SC doesn't seem like a massive hike in prices over that time period.

The RRP of forks is another matter though!

I do wonder who actually spends 7 grand of their own money on a bike that will be ridden up and down the side of mountains for fun (i.e. not racing.) Single people I imagine 😉

Dear "Customers", please have a word with yourself.....

When did it become justifiable to consider buy a bike for SEVEN THOUSAND POUNDS was ok? Whilst gawpping at Evans (bikes not clothes catalog) online I noticed that bikes around £1000 didn't start until page SEVENTEEN!!!

They sell them because people buy them. I really can't blame them for that

I suppose for a while people liked bikes they thought they could have the top of the range. That is more expensive than it was. Not that I care. Last years or used for me 😀

PS Evans allow filtering by price so you can save 17 page reloads buy setting your max prices as £1000

They sell them because people buy them. I really can't blame them for that

when i was a lad, can of coke and portion of chips for 50p 🙂

Think thats roughly £2.50 in most chippys nowdays.....feeling old thinking about it.

cakefacesmallblock - Member
When I was a lad I could by a can of coke and a mars bar for less than 50p
Hell's teeth. I'm starting to get this inflation thing, now. It was way under 25p when I were a lad

6p in new money an it were a bottle.

6p in new money an it were a bottle.

Aye an you used to get tuppence ha'penny when you gave it back

Whilst we are at it, it seems that an average 10% premium on identical spec 29ers (over what the 'same' bike in 26" cocsts) also seems to be the norm. When are we going to get to the point where the volume of 29ers you sell worldwide means that the r&d 'premium' should actually be more on your 26" bikes? (yes you specialized 👿 )

http://www.evanscycles.com/categories/bikes/mountain-bikes/f?page=1

If you look at the Evans Mountain Bikes bikes in order of popularity not surprisingly in general the list starts with cheap bikes and ends with expensive bike. But there are lots of expensive bikes in the first third of the list and a £4000 bike on the first page of 29. Everyone will be delighted to know that its a 650b bike! I expect a central London branch might expect to sell a higher proportion of high end stuff

This is why I'm learning to make my own bicycles out of discarded pubes and human excrement.

Www.artisancycles.co.uk

We do a range of bespoke earth-tone colorways

dear 'the bike industry'

thanks for making awesome bikes for us to cock around on.

and thanks for selling bikes like this:

[img] [/img]

for £1200.

i love you.

I remember in about 1997 the exotic high-end bikes being £4k. Plugged that into an inflation calculator and that came back with £6168.40 - so not far off. I'd bet the high-end of now is many orders of magnitude better than back in the 90s too

Maybe the ultra exotica! In 2000 an S-Works FSR was £2400, admittedly it was mainly XT, and not absolute top draw spec, but they have gone up significantly beyond inflation IMO.

That said it doesn't really bother me, if you don't want to buy one... Don't.

As long as it's £7k bloke's bike allowing £1k bloke to be able to afford his, I guess that's fine. Just got this nagging feeling that £7k bloke just may be helping a 700 quid bike cost a grand.
That said, it would be nice to have £7k sloshing around waiting for me to spend it !

And if anyone from the bike industry is reading this, please could you persuade anyone who persists with using the term "colorway"(sic) to please shoot themselves.

sadly american

even sadder someone might actually get shot but not the marketing guff guru

Maybe it is because I ride SS but I can't fathom these prices, I have built a Niner Air 9 Carbon for about £4-4.5k which is insane as it is but I realy can't think what the hell I could spend to go higher without going proper mad on £500 stems etc which these prebuilt 7k+ don't have either.

What I was irritated about is the crap level groupset lower midrange bikes have, I think spending £500-700 on a bike like my mate did and getting base deore / alivio kit with a token "better" rear mech is taking the piddle, I know this is "as good as" mid range of 5 years ago etc but I can't help feeling people spending £1k or less are getting jipped.

Apart from cycle to work schemes which are perpetuating poor value for money under 1k as you have to buy rrp not sale prices on most of them any sane person would be last years model for half the price.

£500-700 on a bike like my mate did and getting base deore / alivio kit with a token "better" rear mech is taking the piddle, I know this is "as good as" mid range of 5 years ago etc but I can't help feeling people spending £1k or less are getting jipped.

That's the price of a "base spec" deore/alivio equipped bike which ~20 years ago would have been STX/ alivio mix and cost about £350-450 so inflation is about right and to be fair deore isn't bad kit, it does its job and lasts. You want SLX/XT pony up son thats £1k plus and you'll still have the same gears basically.

cookeaa - Member

to be fair deore isn't bad kit

Today's Deore is brilliant kit, miles ahead of pretty much anything from five years ago, brakes especially.

I think the problem with the sub £1000 bike is that we are trying to squeeze a lot in. Namely fork and disc brakes. Back in the day neither of these high cost options were on the radar

Today's Deore is brilliant kit, miles ahead of pretty much anything from five years ago, brakes especially.

15 years ago yes, 10 maybe, 5 years ago... Pull the other one, its barely any different!

I think Deore brakes have had 2 big upgrades in the last 5 years

595 turned something round. It certainly looks way different to what came before

the 596 added servo wave

They sell them because people buy them. I really can't blame them for that

Really? I've always assumed that the reason that you have £7k bikes is to make people think that spending £3.5k on a bike is somehow reasonable...

I don't blame the manufacturers and retailers for pitching ever more expensive bikes at us, but I was both disappointed and amused to learn from a recent STW that I haven't yet bought my "first proper mountain bike" as I haven't yet spent over £2k on a bike 🙄

but I was both disappointed and amused to learn from a recent STW that I haven't yet bought my "first proper mountain bike" as I haven't yet spent over £2k on a bike.

I'm not even half way there

I do like the 5k bikes on evans with x9 - 5k won't buy you top of the range components on a standard production frame.

I am another who has never bought a proper mountain bike - mine have all been sub-1k end-of-line specials

[quoteWhen did it become justifiable to consider that charging SEVEN THOUSAND POUNDS was ok

Why does anyone have to justify it?]

I paid £120 for my frame older frame, £70 for the current one, and £100 for the forks.

It's still 100x better (to me) than a top of the range £7k bike.

It does what I want it to do, and if I snap it in two (unlikely being a steel HT), I'll buy another cheap one.

Why do you t think organisations do not need to justify their behaviour?

I think anyone who buys a 7K bike will negotiate a fairly hefty discount, or have that much spare cash that it's not 'that' much to drop on a nice bike.

To be fair, £7k is about halfway up the ladder... (OP, I hope you are sat down when you see this)

http://www.thebikerooms.com/bikes/pinarello-graal-2012-dura-ace-di2-sky.html

but I was both disappointed and amused to learn from a recent STW that I haven't yet bought my "first proper mountain bike" as I haven't yet spent over £2k on a bike

That one, single statement has put me right off the mag at the mo.