Originally Posted by
Jughed
Tip of the iceberg.
Not just Trek, not just bikes…luxury toys, RV’s, Auto’s - houses -
Absolutely everything is priced accordingly to match 2 full time incomes and mass amounts of credit/debt.
There is no more “up”, there is no more (well very little) to extract from the general population.
Trek, other brands… how do they clear overstock without tanking the prices of new models? How do they pay their vendors/suppliers/manufacturers? And how do all of them react and survive after some of their biggest customers go belly up. And so on and so on down the line…
Multiply that by all the other industries that are in the same boat… pop. The auto industry is a house of cards- once again…
I fully expect a pop coming soon, a big pop.
Yeah, well, maybe. But I'm not sure this is right. Statistics show that overall consumer spending is rising, driven by increased spending by the well-off and not counterbalanced by decreases in spending by the less fortunate. There is rising income inequality, meaning maybe that fewer can afford expensive discretionary items such as new bicycles. But if that could feasibly be balanced by the well-off buying more super-bikes.
You could argue that what the bike manufactures need is less income inequality so that more people could afford their bikes, but if consumer spending overall is going up, then some other sector must be prospering.
Probably any further discussion along these lines would need to go to P&R.