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I grew up with a slew of craptastic second hand, thrift store and K-Mart level bikes since it was all we could afford (and as I grew, the bikes grew). We used t

by bane 10y ago

I grew up with a slew of craptastic second hand, thrift store and K-Mart level bikes since it was all we could afford (and as I grew, the bikes grew). We used to beat the living snot out of those bikes and I don't remember any of them costing more than $150 new and they either never broke or were easy to repair. I would expect to pay no more than around $300 for a similar quality of bike these days. The last time I walked into a bike shop I turned right around and walked out. Since when did bikes get so unbelievably expensive? I just wanted one for tooting around the neighborhood and maybe popping a curb or two, and the cheapest I could find was around $500. Most were easily in the $1000-$3000 range. I think younger people have been trained that bikes need to be expensive but unless you're doing some very very intensive mountain biking or road racing you probably will never encounter a problem with a Walmart-class bike. Every year Costco sells some bikes for around $300-$400 and they're in the class that I care about. Probably "better" than Walmart, but not these outrageous prices in bike stores. IKEA quality is also often very questionable, the "Family" price seems closer to reasonable. $400 otherwise? No way. I really just want a Hyundai Elantra bike, not a BMW M3 or a Ferrari.

geon 10y ago
It feels quite obvious that a specialized bike store would focus on the more hard core end of the spectrum, since otherwise they would need to compete with wallmart and costco.
- xapata 10y ago
  That may be your intuition, but I wouldn't describe riding a few miles in the city at a casual pace as "hard core" (my typical ride).
mwill 10y ago
Me and my friends used to buy the cheapest bikes we could out in rural Australia, as low as $50 AUD. We would flog them in the ground for a month or so, when they finally gave out left them right where they broke, and went bought another one. No one wanted a good bike because a good bike was too good not to fix, and no one had the money to fix a good bike. It was also the kind of town where if you had a good bike, it would get stolen for sure.
slewis 10y ago
There were expensive bikes back then too. There are cheap bikes now. It depends where you look.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  The cheap bikes are much cheaper today (in terms of build quality, though there are some that are, inflation-adjusted, lower priced than the cheapest bikes when I was a kid). I mostly had cheap bikes as a kid, and they held up really well. The quality was lower than that of a "good" bike, but not remarkably so. My first two bikes, a Huffy (from K Mart) and a Ross Piranha (from Toys R Us) had Chromoly frames and forks, and held up to years of intense abuse (ramps, dirt jumping, lots of falling and running into things). When I started earning my own money, I bought a General RL Osborne, which was a significant upgrade...but, not orders of magnitude better. The quality of what is sold at Walmart today, at least in the general case, is really low. I wouldn't trust the linked bike to be safe on day one, much less to hold up to years of service. I tried to fix up a friend's low end Schwinn, that was less than ten years old, but it would have been cheaper to buy an all new bike than to fix everything that was wrong with it (shifters didn't work, derailleur was broken, brakes were soggy and couldn't be adjusted to work well, the fork had shocks and would bottom out when applying brakes even lightly). The frame was definitely not chromoly (might have been aluminum, as it was pretty light weight, but could have been thin steel, too I guess). On the other hand, I have a mid-range Giant mountain bike that I bought in 1994 for about $480 that has often been my primary mode of transportation. It's needed new shifters one time, a couple of new cassettes, one new set of brake and shift cables, a new seat, one new rim (I ran into a fire hydrant at a pretty decent clip), and tubes and tires. It's taken a beating over the years. I dunno what I'm trying to say, exactly, but I think the overall quality of bike-to-dollar has gone down, especially at the low end of the market. The mid range of the market still seems pretty good, when inflation adjusted, though I will note that finding an all chromoly frame and fork (or other high quality material) bike is much harder than it used to be, and it is impossible in the low end, where it used to be very easy.
  - bane 10y ago
    Maybe that's it? Maybe the shitty bikes I remember from my youth were actually just better than the equivalently priced bikes of today? I sold my last bike for $50 after a decade of really hard city and trail riding, even taking a couple dives off the edge of a 20 foot fall and getting in a minor car accident. That owner kept it for another decade and outside of normal part wear and repair, used it well for some pretty hardcore trail biking. It's now on at least it's 3rd owner and last I heard was going strong. I bought that bike new in the late '80s for no more than $200 IIR, but the story of the bike sounds more like what I hear from modern $2k-$3k bikes...except without most of the fuss. I feel like the market has really bifurcated into two segments: a) what I'm willing to pay, but not made well b) more than I'm willing to pay, and offers more performance than I'd ever conceivably use I, and I'm sure many consumers, really would like some kind of middle ground.
xapata 10y ago
I ran a volunteer bike repair shop for a while. The big box store bikes, like Walmart, Target, etc. have terrible parts. Brakes that fail. Wheels that bend. A girl at my school was killed because she rode in front of a garbage truck. Bystanders said it looked like she was trying to break and couldn't. Sometimes this is because the big box store employees put the brakes on backwards, with the pads facing away from the wheel. I've seen it. If you want a cheap bike, buy a good one used. Craigslist is an excellent resource. A quality frame lasts forever (unless misused or left in the rain) and decent replacement parts aren't crazy expensive.
dntrkv 10y ago
"Since when did bikes get so unbelievably expensive?" Quality bikes have always been expensive. You can still go buy a cheap bike at Walmart as the parent post points out. "unless you're doing some very very intensive mountain biking or road racing you probably will never encounter a problem with a Walmart-class bike." Nonsense, riding a quality bike is a much better experience in every single aspect. They're lighter, they have better brakes, shifting is smoother and more consistent, they're more comfortable. You can get the exact size you need instead of a one size fits all approach. Also, one of the most important factors in a bike's reliability is how well it's assembled, and you can be sure that places like Walmart will do a terrible job.
Spooky23 10y ago
In 1997, I would agree with you 100%. Times have changed, and things get cheaper and more terrible. I bought a cheapo WalMart bike on vacation when mine was damaged in transit in a minor car accident. I was riding on a bike path, swerved to avoid something and went off a high curb. The impact cracked a frame weld. It's a weird market. There's a market for cheap stuff that doesn't get used, and outrageous stuff for fanatics. No ,idle ground.
tehwalrus 10y ago
I used to work in Halfords in the UK and they sold adult bikes in the apollo range for £75. They do still have one for £80 on their website. The apollo outrider (as it was then called) was always pretty shoddy, but mostly just for the look and feel of the components, a bit heavy etc. We didn't get that many of them back in for repair.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  > We didn't get that many of them back in for repair. But you don't know if they're actually used. My mum and sister have cheap bikes from Halfords. They see less than 50km of use per year. I used something similar (maybe Asda or Tesco's version?) and it was ruined with 1000km or so of use -- every bearing worn out, the wheel rims worn ... it was miserable to ride it.
  - tehwalrus 10y ago
    Sure, I thought that point had been made elsewhere in the thread.
dashundchen 10y ago
I find that most US bike shops fall into two categories - either a general bike shop with a lot of models, or the racing/road oriented that focus on carbon fiber, racing etc. If you want a general around town bike, I usually recommend the Trek FX series or Giant Escape hybrids. They're a light aluminium, but sturdy, use standard, durable, entry level components, have wider 700c tires good for handling potholes and curbs, mounts for racks - and worlds better ride quality then your run of the mill department store bike. They're also common enough that you can find them used for under $300, or new starting around $380 or so. Models climb in price as they start adding higher level components but the entry level is usually good enough.
bane 10y ago
Can't edit my original post, but here's a decent review of a crappy Walmart bike by a dedicated rider. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vI2bYhCrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vI2bYhCrk For the record, I'm probably a slow beginner leisure rider on beginner trails, I probably wouldn't be doing even half of the things in the video so I wouldn't be very alarmed. He has some other tests of the bikes and what kind of realistic destruction these kinds of bikes can endure.

by bane 10y ago

geon 10y ago

It feels quite obvious that a specialized bike store would focus on the more hard core end of the spectrum, since otherwise they would need to compete with wallmart and costco.

xapata 10y ago
That may be your intuition, but I wouldn't describe riding a few miles in the city at a casual pace as "hard core" (my typical ride).

mwill 10y ago

Me and my friends used to buy the cheapest bikes we could out in rural Australia, as low as $50 AUD. We would flog them in the ground for a month or so, when they finally gave out left them right where they broke, and went bought another one. No one wanted a good bike because a good bike was too good not to fix, and no one had the money to fix a good bike. It was also the kind of town where if you had a good bike, it would get stolen for sure.

slewis 10y ago

There were expensive bikes back then too. There are cheap bikes now. It depends where you look.

SwellJoe 10y ago
The cheap bikes are much cheaper today (in terms of build quality, though there are some that are, inflation-adjusted, lower priced than the cheapest bikes when I was a kid). I mostly had cheap bikes as a kid, and they held up really well. The quality was lower than that of a "good" bike, but not remarkably so. My first two bikes, a Huffy (from K Mart) and a Ross Piranha (from Toys R Us) had Chromoly frames and forks, and held up to years of intense abuse (ramps, dirt jumping, lots of falling and running into things). When I started earning my own money, I bought a General RL Osborne, which was a significant upgrade...but, not orders of magnitude better. The quality of what is sold at Walmart today, at least in the general case, is really low. I wouldn't trust the linked bike to be safe on day one, much less to hold up to years of service. I tried to fix up a friend's low end Schwinn, that was less than ten years old, but it would have been cheaper to buy an all new bike than to fix everything that was wrong with it (shifters didn't work, derailleur was broken, brakes were soggy and couldn't be adjusted to work well, the fork had shocks and would bottom out when applying brakes even lightly). The frame was definitely not chromoly (might have been aluminum, as it was pretty light weight, but could have been thin steel, too I guess). On the other hand, I have a mid-range Giant mountain bike that I bought in 1994 for about $480 that has often been my primary mode of transportation. It's needed new shifters one time, a couple of new cassettes, one new set of brake and shift cables, a new seat, one new rim (I ran into a fire hydrant at a pretty decent clip), and tubes and tires. It's taken a beating over the years. I dunno what I'm trying to say, exactly, but I think the overall quality of bike-to-dollar has gone down, especially at the low end of the market. The mid range of the market still seems pretty good, when inflation adjusted, though I will note that finding an all chromoly frame and fork (or other high quality material) bike is much harder than it used to be, and it is impossible in the low end, where it used to be very easy.
- bane 10y ago
  Maybe that's it? Maybe the shitty bikes I remember from my youth were actually just better than the equivalently priced bikes of today? I sold my last bike for $50 after a decade of really hard city and trail riding, even taking a couple dives off the edge of a 20 foot fall and getting in a minor car accident. That owner kept it for another decade and outside of normal part wear and repair, used it well for some pretty hardcore trail biking. It's now on at least it's 3rd owner and last I heard was going strong. I bought that bike new in the late '80s for no more than $200 IIR, but the story of the bike sounds more like what I hear from modern $2k-$3k bikes...except without most of the fuss. I feel like the market has really bifurcated into two segments: a) what I'm willing to pay, but not made well b) more than I'm willing to pay, and offers more performance than I'd ever conceivably use I, and I'm sure many consumers, really would like some kind of middle ground.

xapata 10y ago

I ran a volunteer bike repair shop for a while. The big box store bikes, like Walmart, Target, etc. have terrible parts. Brakes that fail. Wheels that bend. A girl at my school was killed because she rode in front of a garbage truck. Bystanders said it looked like she was trying to break and couldn't. Sometimes this is because the big box store employees put the brakes on backwards, with the pads facing away from the wheel. I've seen it. If you want a cheap bike, buy a good one used. Craigslist is an excellent resource. A quality frame lasts forever (unless misused or left in the rain) and decent replacement parts aren't crazy expensive.

dntrkv 10y ago

"Since when did bikes get so unbelievably expensive?" Quality bikes have always been expensive. You can still go buy a cheap bike at Walmart as the parent post points out. "unless you're doing some very very intensive mountain biking or road racing you probably will never encounter a problem with a Walmart-class bike." Nonsense, riding a quality bike is a much better experience in every single aspect. They're lighter, they have better brakes, shifting is smoother and more consistent, they're more comfortable. You can get the exact size you need instead of a one size fits all approach. Also, one of the most important factors in a bike's reliability is how well it's assembled, and you can be sure that places like Walmart will do a terrible job.

Spooky23 10y ago

In 1997, I would agree with you 100%. Times have changed, and things get cheaper and more terrible. I bought a cheapo WalMart bike on vacation when mine was damaged in transit in a minor car accident. I was riding on a bike path, swerved to avoid something and went off a high curb. The impact cracked a frame weld. It's a weird market. There's a market for cheap stuff that doesn't get used, and outrageous stuff for fanatics. No ,idle ground.

tehwalrus 10y ago

I used to work in Halfords in the UK and they sold adult bikes in the apollo range for £75. They do still have one for £80 on their website. The apollo outrider (as it was then called) was always pretty shoddy, but mostly just for the look and feel of the components, a bit heavy etc. We didn't get that many of them back in for repair.

Symbiote 10y ago
> We didn't get that many of them back in for repair. But you don't know if they're actually used. My mum and sister have cheap bikes from Halfords. They see less than 50km of use per year. I used something similar (maybe Asda or Tesco's version?) and it was ruined with 1000km or so of use -- every bearing worn out, the wheel rims worn ... it was miserable to ride it.
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  Sure, I thought that point had been made elsewhere in the thread.

dashundchen 10y ago

I find that most US bike shops fall into two categories - either a general bike shop with a lot of models, or the racing/road oriented that focus on carbon fiber, racing etc. If you want a general around town bike, I usually recommend the Trek FX series or Giant Escape hybrids. They're a light aluminium, but sturdy, use standard, durable, entry level components, have wider 700c tires good for handling potholes and curbs, mounts for racks - and worlds better ride quality then your run of the mill department store bike. They're also common enough that you can find them used for under $300, or new starting around $380 or so. Models climb in price as they start adding higher level components but the entry level is usually good enough.

bane 10y ago

Can't edit my original post, but here's a decent review of a crappy Walmart bike by a dedicated rider. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vI2bYhCrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vI2bYhCrk For the record, I'm probably a slow beginner leisure rider on beginner trails, I probably wouldn't be doing even half of the things in the video so I wouldn't be very alarmed. He has some other tests of the bikes and what kind of realistic destruction these kinds of bikes can endure.