Up to now, many factories & bike makers had 2 year old product. As day to day, month to month buffer in demand variability accumulated & compounded in various warehouses in various markets for various model as bean counters made their best guess of how many of X model in X size would be ordered in X place. It doesn't make sense for a satellite distribution warehouse to to ship one-off, year-end leftovers back the continent distribution hub except in bulk on a single truck at years end.
That single truck of say 50 bikes usually ended up at a wherever the continental distribution warehouse is to be listed on the employees/professional/industry insider/non-consumer section of their website for internal sale, warranty return reasons, etc...
The point was even the factory spares of 1 or 2 or 3 of a particular model are gone & not coming back. Do you really think an industry supply chain can operate properly with no buffer? None at all?
Just how tight can you pull a rubber band?
This is exactly the concern everybody is having when the rubber band snaps...bubble burst, whatever, year-end Onesie-twosies becoming thousands, tens of thousands. Then what? Maybe a BF thread entitled: "
The bubble is upon us?"
Nobody cares why you bought your bike. That your bike existed at all as a onsie-twosie meant that the supply chain was more or less smooth, predictable, able to be forecast with reasonable,
acceptable accuracy.
You got lucky in that your bike was a 2 years old buffer bike sitting like a stuck link in the supply chain somewhere gumming up the works. Likely returned back to the manufacturer after being in the wild. Selling it to you at that time at discount yielded better profit for whoever was involved & was cheaper than the cost of dealing with it further. The loss of X-percent potential profit on 1 bike of a few thousand made was an acceptable trade because that one bike was displacing one that would yield full profit &/or the accumulated costs of it's existence teetered on becoming a loss.
Read this again.
There is more to supply chain than the bike slot at your LBS.