Originally Posted by
cyccommute
They are the lower end bikes at bike shops. But they cost $500 which is a very fair cost and good value.
$500 is simply not an acceptable price for basic capability. It needs to cost half of that, and given that there are things on the market for a quarter of that, half seems achievable.
Blame those Big Box stores you want people to buy bikes from.
I'd rather consider how to move them from being part of the problem to being part of the solution.
The features that they add are meant to bring people in to buy a bike that won’t do what they are advertising them for.
No disagreement there. Neither the problem nor the solution is on the stores alone - purchasers clearly own the other half of the problem. We're "stuck" in grove where an inexpensive bike has to be featureful crap.
But there exists another grove where an inexpensive bike can instead be simpler and more durable.
Neither the stores nor the purchasers can alone climb out of one grove and drop into the other; it would have be be an organized effort of multiple players in partnership - stores and their supply chains, organizations like coops to provide mechanical support and education -
including why you want the simple one, and not the 21 speed with suspension.
Case in point, over on the streetblog article someone observed:
Originally Posted by SomeCommentorAtStreetsblog
I've worked on many bikes that simply can't be set up to index properly, and that's on just 6, 7, or 8 speeds!
To which I'd simply say, don't use indexed shifting - it's a delicate and unnecessary feature. It never worked right on my college-era big-box MTB, so I just switched it to friction mode and shifted by feel and ear.