Mr. Tugger,

Dude, right now I'm laid up from a crash last Friday and cannot ride. You are fighting in the mud with a pig who's loving it.

And I'm tired of people dishing on Trek. They think they are fighting for the little guy or something. But really, the little guy would love to be the big guy and if given half the chance, would emulate the big guy in every respect. And it's because the big guys exist that companies like Parlee or Calfee can exist. Trek is the company who gets the boutique manufacturers business. Nobody gets a Crumpton, Ruegamer or Parlee as their first bike. Very few people race on these frames. Everyone who owns one of these fine bikes also owns or has owned at some previous time something more mundane.

If Trek were to disappear from the planet, your boutique companies would either 1) die a rapid death from customer starvation or 2) become a Trek and fill the void, not with their boutique bikes, but with the mass produced bikes you hate so much. Didn't Colnago or some other well known boutique bike recently introduce a budget road bike frame that was, gasp, made in Taiwan?

You think Trek bikes are crap because you think that, because they are big, they must be crap. So, you hop on a Trek and immediately find something wrong with it; you notice it on the Trek, but excuse it when you ride a bicycle from a different company. Because it is fashionable to rip on big companies and drool over little nitch companies, you hop on board the hater bandwagon.

In short, Trek fills an important position in the market. If it's not Trek, some other company would gear up and become Trek. That's just how the world works. Deal with it. The smaller companies are small because the realize they cannot and don't want to compete with Trek. They carve out a little nitch that allows them to be profitable while not challenging the big boys.