Is This Some Kind Of Game?

Trek Checkmate SLR - Image courtesy of Trek Bikes

 NOTE: Large doses of "my opinion" will be handed out in gloppy dollops today. You've been forewarned.....

 A few days ago I took a look at what we had to "invent" to use for riding gravel roads. Now, just twenty years later, things have sure changed!

 Looking around at what bicycles there are for gravel road riding lately is pretty bizarre. It seems as though chaos is the rule of the day when it comes to what you can get. You can spend a whole heck of a lot of money, or you can spend a lot less for a similar bicycle. 

New, off the peg bikes, like this top-of-the-range Trek Checkmate SLR, go for well North of 10K. But you can get brand new, deeply discounted gravel bikes from places like Jenson USA for well South of that same 10K and get similar, or the same gear bolted to it. That's thousands of dollars difference. This seems not just significant, but really odd. 

I won't even get into the used marketplace, which is rife with choices in lightly used, very high-end gravel bikes. I see these on Facebook Marketplace on the daily.  I would imagine other sources have even more choices.

It is no wonder then when I see comment sections filled with angry and dismissive comments pointed at the bicycle industry. What is this stuff really worth? Take that Checkmate frame and fork, for example. Trek offers it up at a dollar less than $4,000.00. You can get a very similar frame from the Chinese company, ICAN, for a dollar less than $900.00. Now, come on! Does anyone really believe that Trek's frame and fork are $3,100.00 better? 

Titanium Fargo - Image courtesy of Salsa Cycles

You could buy the ICAN frame and get a titanium Fargo for the price of one Trek Checkmate frame and fork. That just seems really weird. 

This pricing just does not make sense, so I get why many people feel the cycling industry is a "rip-off". Try playing "The Price Is Right" with any cycling related items and you'd be hard pressed to nail the prices with any degree of consistency based on the perceived "value". How can you judge this pricing when it just doesn't add up?

Then you throw in all the major discounting that has been happening, which I have not accounted for in my examples here, and it gets even weirder. I'm all for people getting paid, but when there is no consistency, and no real innovations to point at, it becomes hard to put your trust into anything, especially when it cost thousands of dollars. 

Does it surprise you then when you see sales are flat? Does it surprise you to see companies having difficult financial times? Does it surprise you to hear rumors of companies taking out huge loans to pay employees and keep things afloat? I am not surprised at all. Especially when it becomes so hard to perceive "value" when contrasted with price. 

I also think that there are just far too many bicycles being produced and expected to sell every year. Every marketing trick in the book to get us to feel we need to jump on to the next shiny thing has been tried and now all the tricks have played out. Even adding gears, adding motors, and taking away cables - or hiding them - is not enough to change many people's minds anymore. There simply is just 'too much stuff' out there. We simply do not need it. 

I think it is high time the game changed.