4 ms·

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

by slewis 10y ago

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.
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    I agree; $500-$750 will buy a pretty good mid-range bike, today (probably comparable to a $300-$400 bike of 15 years ago). But, there's no such thing as a "pretty good $200 bike" that I've been able to find. Anything in the very low end is effectively disposable; made too cheaply to be worth repairing, and will need major repair to stay on the road within a few years. If the frame and fork were decent quality, you could upgrade over time (which was common in my day, when solidly constructed Chromoly frame and forks were available on <$150 bikes), but they're just not. Even the $500 bikes of today will have lower cost aluminum or steel forks, even if the frame is a high quality material (like a better quality of aluminum of chromoly). I don't understand the flight of American manufacturing well enough to know what was causative and what is merely correlation, but nearly all of the bikes when I was a kid were made in the US. As manufacturing has gone overseas, the quality has gone way down. I know that Chinese factories can make high quality bikes (because they make most of the high end brands, as well as the cheap ones); but, a lot of brands that used to mean "decent cheap bike" like Huffy and Schwinn and Mongoose mostly only mean "cheap", today (Schwinn still has some decent bikes in their higher end). I've clearly got a lot of grumpiness about bikes! I may love bikes too much.
  - kemayo 10y ago
    Do bear in mind inflation. $200 in 1987 is approximately equivalent to $430 today [1]. So we could reasonably predict, ignoring technology changes, that your $200 bike was at least twice as good as a $200 bike bought this year. [1]: http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=200&year=1987 http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=20...

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

by slewis 10y ago

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

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.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I agree; $500-$750 will buy a pretty good mid-range bike, today (probably comparable to a $300-$400 bike of 15 years ago). But, there's no such thing as a "pretty good $200 bike" that I've been able to find. Anything in the very low end is effectively disposable; made too cheaply to be worth repairing, and will need major repair to stay on the road within a few years. If the frame and fork were decent quality, you could upgrade over time (which was common in my day, when solidly constructed Chromoly frame and forks were available on <$150 bikes), but they're just not. Even the $500 bikes of today will have lower cost aluminum or steel forks, even if the frame is a high quality material (like a better quality of aluminum of chromoly). I don't understand the flight of American manufacturing well enough to know what was causative and what is merely correlation, but nearly all of the bikes when I was a kid were made in the US. As manufacturing has gone overseas, the quality has gone way down. I know that Chinese factories can make high quality bikes (because they make most of the high end brands, as well as the cheap ones); but, a lot of brands that used to mean "decent cheap bike" like Huffy and Schwinn and Mongoose mostly only mean "cheap", today (Schwinn still has some decent bikes in their higher end). I've clearly got a lot of grumpiness about bikes! I may love bikes too much.
- kemayo 10y ago
  Do bear in mind inflation. $200 in 1987 is approximately equivalent to $430 today [1]. So we could reasonably predict, ignoring technology changes, that your $200 bike was at least twice as good as a $200 bike bought this year. [1]: http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=200&year=1987 http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=20...