Additional to yesterday’s submit in regards to the bewildering number of bicycles accessible to the fashionable client, this morning the next story caught my eye:
Now, I need to be completely clear right here: I’ve no drawback in any respect with the author touring to Vermont on a press journey for a motorcycle. If you happen to’re a author, and also you’re a bicycle owner, and somebody desires you to come back to Vermont and experience a motorcycle, you need to go to Vermont, and you need to experience that bike.
Moreover, she is totally appropriate that accessibly-priced bicycles are way more essential to most of us than five-figure superbikes with ugly-ass forks or no matter:
And she or he’s proper that every one these ultra-high-end bikes are mainly all the identical anyway. (Not that I’ve actually ridden any of them, however all of them use the very same elements and the very same geometry, so how might they not be?)
Most of all, I undoubtedly haven’t any drawback along with her recommending the bike. If she rode the bike, and he or she preferred the bike, then she ought to give anyone considering buying it the inexperienced mild to take action.
So be assured I’m not impugning the author in any approach–fairly the other, in reality. If something, I’m un-pugning her.
Nonetheless, its essential to recollect this weblog continues to be known as “Bike Snob NYC,” not “Pleased Inclusive Bicycle Lover NYC,” so after all there was one thing that aggravated me, and it’s the bike itself:
Even accepting that accessible bikes are a great factor, did the world actually need the nine-millionth fully indistinguishable gravel bike that makes you sleepy simply it? What number of of this stuff can the human race probably soak up? We’re already previous the purpose the place the biking media is pushing 28 (!)-bike sub-$2,000 gravel bike round-ups and “testing” them by the lots of. HUNDREDS! And but right here’s one other one, precisely like all of the others, solely this time from the world’s largest big-box sporting items retailer:
Once more, I’ll remind you I absolutely assist the author. Moreover, I’m additionally not morally troubled by commerce, capitalism, company progress, personal wealth, burning fossil fuels to go locations in airplanes, or any of the opposite issues individuals rail in opposition to with their smartphones, utilizing the social networks run by the very individuals they so despise. I went to Bentonville, I rode the Walmart trails, I visited the Walmart artwork museum, I loved myself very a lot, and I’ve no qualms about it.
Nonetheless, I do discover the ensuing bikes mind-numbingly boring, which is why I can’t actually relate to this:
However whereas the revenue margins could also be small, in relation to the variety of bikes offered, that $1400 bike goes to outsell the $11,000 flagship three to 1. It’s the sort of bike that provides somebody their first style of gravel driving or bikepacking. The one which helps an grownup fall again in love with driving for the primary time since childhood. The bike a mum or dad buys for a youngster simply moving into the game. And the bike you see each Saturday morning, leaning in opposition to the wall of your favorite espresso store, well-loved and unfazed if it ideas over.
I imply sure, it’s true, a brand new rider could very properly get one among these GRVL AF (I assume that’s gravel-ese for “Gravel As Fuck,” what an terrible identify) and start a life-long love affair with biking. And I hope they do! (Start a life-long love affair with biking, that’s. I’m largely detached to which bike they select.) But it surely’s not like Decathlon are performing some kind of mitzvah or appearing altruistically right here. Slightly, for some motive they merely really feel the necessity to deliver their boring-ass gravel bike over right here to The US of America (Canada and Greenland pending) to compete with all the opposite corporations already promoting an identical boring-ass gravel bikes.
Why? I dunno. Progress? So that you gained’t stroll into your native bikes store (in the event you nonetheless have one) and purchase a gravel bike from a smaller bike firm (if there nonetheless are any)?
I don’t imply to get all paranoid and dsytopian right here (that’s a lie, I completely do) but it surely looks like we’re perhaps a 12 months and a half from your entire bicycle trade, media included, turning into one nice large drop-shipping operation run fully by AI.
Pleased Friday!
