Breaking the rule of “never read the comments”.
If you look at bike websites for the best way to clean your bike or lubricate your chain, you always run into the outrage videos and blogs of “why does this bike cost more than a car?”
- It’s because you haven’t bought a car in a long time, boomer. You can’t buy a car for $15k anymore, not even used ones, really. Go buy a two-year-old bike. Those are cheap.
- If you are buying a $15k bike with Dura-ace, you’re a dentist, so stop complaining. The general rule is that people who should ride Dura-ace don’t pay for their bikes. If you buy Dura-ace instead of Ultegra, you get what you deserve. If you don’t, that bike isn’t $15k, it’s $8k.
Yeah, the inflation rate says that it’s still too much. Yeah, late-stage capitalism and marketing. But I work in in business that does low volume semi-custom kinda purchases, like high-end bikes, and those have all gone up by a factor of 4, not 2x as the inflation calculator might tell you. Lead times have gone up 4x. Everyone is sick all the time. People get paid more now, which is where all the expense is anyway [1], and they should. $15k bikes aren’t round tubes anymore, and super-light NACA profile Kamm-tail molded or 3D printed CFRFP aero bikes with hidden cables and disk brakes don’t get designed and built by a guy in a barn anymore [2]. They get designed by a team of people in a wind-tunnel. Engineering degrees cost money, and engineers expect to get paid.
As they should. You wouldn’t be even looking at $15k bikes if you didn’t expect to get paid. Selfish bastard.
[1] “Costs walk on two legs”. In other words, the materials costs are inconsequential. Putting those together into a bike-shaped object is not
[2] That person in the barn is also expecting to get paid at least $15k for that custom-made bike