Originally Posted by
wgscott
I've always found it amusing that you can spend huge piles of money on gratuitous luxury automobile stuff, and everyone is supposed to respect that, but if you tell (non-bike) people you just got a nice set of wheels for $1.2K, they think you are insane....
Part of the problem may be the issues of perceived value and the width of the price spectrum.
In the auto world, a basic car these days is about $20k, with $30k probably being closer to the average. A high end luxury car is $60-90k or roughly 3-4 times what people know cars cost.
If we look at bikes, a decent basic bike is about $350, with a big box bike being considerably less (but then we're not looking at Yugos either), so, extrapolating from the auto world, $1,500 would be the perceived high end, yet, as you point out people are spending that much or more for just wheels, and over 5 times that or 20 times the cost of a basic bike for something we here would call pricey.
Of course, it might be fairer to compare high end bikes to exotic race cars rather than street cars, but that would call for an explanation to the uninitiated.
BTW - it's interesting to note that over the last 50 years or so, basic but decent bikes have become cheaper by almost half, while high end bikes have gotten more expensive by 5 or more times after correcting for inflation.