Originally Posted by
non-fixie
"What the farmer doesn't know, the farmer doesn't like."
An old Dutch proverb which also applies to the price of bicycles. Unfamiliar brand name + unfamiliar tubing decal = cheap bike.

My son works as a filed test engineer for a large agricultural company, so he spends a lot of his time working directly with farmers and this is still very true. You might have seen some of his company's big yellow harvesters in the fields in Europe. The same company also makes red machines for the US and other markets. They are identical under the sheet metal, but the farmers remain convinced that their machine is better than the other one.