Originally Posted by
oldlugs
If they want to bring back Schwinn, then do it in Chicago, with the same manufacturing processes used before.
And watch all the lights in Cook County dim every time they throw the switch on the electroforge machine......
Originally Posted by
cudak888
You're overlooking the fact that this has put a small US builder like Detroit Bikes on the map. A Schwinn for a new generation. From their photos on Google, their plant looks like something along the lines of Trek when they first started - if for city bicycles, rather than road bikes.
...
Be realistic: US labor isn't cheap. The Detroit prices are
more than reasonable for an American-made bicycle of this type that isn't a complete pile of crap on a cracker (I'm looking at you, Worksman). Compare it with a US-made CoMotion Pangea -
starting at $1,965 for the frameset alone - or the inexcusably pretentious, poseur "
Wright Brothers Van Cleve" things (also built by CoMotion) at $4,750. Blech.
I can't think of anything that deserves praise more than a small US company churning out practical, cro-mo city bicycles for under a grand.
+1; Imagine the audacity of employing Americans in the manufacturing sector, presumably at living wage, in a city that desperately needs every such job that can be created. It may be an economic drop in the bucket, esp. in these times, but who knows, one small nugget of economic/manufacturing success, followed by another, a few jobs at a time, might be the key to turning things around.