Originally Posted by
RiddleOfSteel
It's certainly been an interesting evolution over the last three decades. Though to be fair, that's THIRTY YEARS! Lots of time for things to go crazy.
I'm not a curmudgeon (at least not much of one unless you walk on my lawn), so I do see that many of the new things introduced since the 90's are indeed the result of incremental improvements. It's just a bit disorienting, feeling like you were at the top of the bike tech game, being frozen in bike shop suspended animation for 25 years, and re-emerging in 2018. Why didn't I venture in to more shops in that time? Maybe it made me feel old to see the Gen-X'ers like me replaced by younger millennials at the repair stand. Also, the shop I worked in transferred ownership and then closed down, so I lost that home base. Additionally, if anything I owned needed repairs, I did them myself, eliminating another reason to go to a bike shop.
Is an older steel frame road bike built up with modern components the "best of both worlds"? I recently built up a vintage steel frame (can be seen in the "Retro Roadie" and "Show Your Late 1980's Schwinn" threads), and it was my first bike with a modern groupset (11-speed Shimano 105 5800). The crankset is a bit ugly, but it works so nicely. No creaks, solid, stiff, and disappears under pedal pressure. It's also my first bike with "brifters", and so far I am actually loving those (my other road bikes have all been down tube shifting). The caliper brakes work significantly better than the older ones. I have "compressionless" Jagwire cables on it. So far, I love it.
I probably have a bit too much money sunk in to a mediocre steel frame, but it still cost me less than buying, say, a brand new Surly or Soma, and I got to pick the components. And it's much lighter than a Surly, and I would argue a nicer bike. And it was fun to do.
Originally Posted by
RiddleOfSteel
As others have noted. Inflation seems to have bikes costing about the same then as now, and $1800 does get you quite a capable race bike (Trek Emonda for one).
The price points are available, but it seems to me that bike shops have a lot more inventory in the higher price bracket than they did before. It does depend on the brand and location of the shop.
My old shop was not in a wealthy area, and we sold LOT of bikes around $350 (today that would be about $575) in, say, 1995. If you went "off brand", you could get a bike for $280. The shop had dozens of them in this price range out on the sales floor. You can find a bike at this price range in a shop, but sales floors are crammed full of more expensive models than before. I think this is adding to the perception that bike prices have gotten out of control.