I also did not take into consideration that our minimum wage here is 1300€/month, and with a 35 hour work week that's around 13 USD/hour.
Our petrol is appropriately taxed by federal and regional governments and is 2 USD/liter, where I believe in the USA it is 0.75 USD/liter.
We also have a tiny fraction of the giant food subsidies that the USA has, and so a Big Mac meal costs 10-11 USD where you only pay 5 USD. So we only eat at McDo as a treat.
Eat cheap food. Have minimal expenses to drive a car. Sedentary lifestyle. Demand for food and fuel is high. Demand for bikes is low. Cheap bikes become expensive.
#KiloTT is end result.
It's absolute opposite here. Good cars cost cash, good food is expensive, everyone has bikes. Even great bikes are low price. The equivalent of a Kilo TT here is 150€, but is from China. This is what I don't understand. Surely it costs the same to ship from China/Taiwan to US or France, and there is no scale differential, because no one wants these cheap no-name bikes with unbranded parts here. The economic logic says that they should be even higher here, since we are buying less of them, wasting space with inventory, etc. But for some reason, your cheap bikes are double the price of our cheap bikes, even though you have higher scale and identical shipping rates from Far East Asia. It's just predatory pricing, obviously. All French ride bikes and we know the values. No one here would pay 300€ for a Kilo TT, the parts on the bike don't even have names. Crazy.
The average 18 year old kid who works at Carrefour (French Wal-Mart) here can buy a Stevens fixie, pay rent and bills with one paycheck.
The average 18 year old kid who works at Wal-Mart in the U.S. would have to save for a month, live at home with parents, and maybe after a month could afford a Kilo TT and a 100 USD cell phone bill.
American cycle culture, yikes!!!! Cheap Big Macs and expensive Kilo TTs.
KILO TT!!!