Originally Posted by seely
Grease is grease... Phil Wood grease is perhaps the biggest scam in the history of cycling. The fact I can walk to the hardware store next to the bike shop I work at and purchase a tub of identical green grease for $3 vs. Phil Wood's 2oz toothpaste tube for $10 is criminal. 99% of shops out there are going to be using lithium or marine bearing grease for ALL applications. Lithium and marine both work, and they are both far cheaper than the stupid brand name designer greases like Park, Pedros or Phils, which I may add are suspiciously similar to marine bearing grease.
I just paid $10 for a tube of Phil because I felt the economic cost of it was actually lower than the automotive stuff. When you factor in the storage cost of that big tub of grease over its lifetime (probably last me years), I was willing to pay and extra 7 bucks for the convenient tube. Of course, I live in a ridiculously small grad student apartment (in economics, can you tell?), but a tube that fits neatly into the compact toolbox was important to me. I agree though, that bike grease, like so many other bike products that are essentially the same as their synthetic automotive counterparts, is outrageously more expensive than it "ought" to be. Classic example of price discrimination--they know that bike owners are generally willing to pay more than car do-it-yourselfers.