This is so very badly needed in the bicycle marketplace. Kudos to Mac Liman for spearheading this crusade.
"Mechanics Ask Walmart, Major Bike Manufacturers to Stop Making and Selling ‘Built-to-Fail’ Bikes"
“The problem with budget bikes is everything. They’re literally built to fail.”
by Aaron Gordon
January 13, 2022, 6:59am
"Mac Liman has been a bike mechanic for 18 years, and she’s seen her fair share of crappy bikes. As the program director for Bikes Together in Denver, a nonprofit that provides bicycles, repairs, and education courses to members of the community, Liman isn’t adopting the snooty tone of a high-end bicycle shop sneering at your 14-speed Trek with mechanical brakes. She’s talking about the kind of bikes, hastily wrenched together out of flat-packed boxes by people with minimal training, that mechanics have long called bike-shaped objects: bikes with misaligned wheels, forks on backwards, and faulty handlebars, bikes that break after just a few dozen hours of use and that cannot be repaired."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdg...-to-fail-bikes
If an auto manufacturer did this, they'd be sued out of existence! "It's only a Toyota Corolla, so it's acceptable that the brakes don't work in the rain!" This is basically what the big box retailer is saying when selling their low-cost bike models. And then there's the durability issue. You think people would accept a car that only lasts about three months with daily use?
It would be nice to see some change.
That said, the consumer has to admit to some culpability here too. How many times has the LBS employee heard, "Wow, $300 for a bike?!!!! My FIRST bike was only... blah, blah, blah!" The consumer has come to believe that if it's sold by a nationwide chain, then it must be "good." Or at least acceptable. So the consumer has come to believe that you CAN get a "good" bike for ten cents on the dollar. Sorry, that's baloney! "There's no such thing as a free lunch." and "When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is!" In other words, the consumer should stop the self-deception. When your Toyota costs $30,000, how can you expect a bicycle to cost $79.94 and be good? You can't! When your house costs $800,000 (and more, MUCH more!), how can you complain about a $600 bike? You shouldn't!
So let's not totally let the consumer off the hook here. They simply have to understand that quality costs money. Durability has a price. You can't expect an $80 bike to "last." Pay up or shut up!
Sign the Petition here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...5L1EA/viewform
PS I was at a college LBS when Firenze POS's were all the rage. Thanks to Matthew's "Top of the Hilll, Daly City" stereo stores, we poor unsuspecting bike mechanics were hit with a barrage of these piles of junk. Many a Bay Area LBS had several of these abandoned heaps taking up storage space. Many a service writer was fired for not refusing to service a Firenze!!!
PPS Oh and one last note... Remember the bike sharing boom? Remember the Lime bikes everywhere? And Ofo? And all the rest? Occupying the bottom of a landfill now. Millions of those bikes - thousands of which were FULLY FUNCTIONAL - went into the trash. Wow, how does a "green, environmental" idea turn into such an offensive environmental catastrophe? We shouldn't have let it happen then. We shouldn't tolerate the continuing carbon footprint waste and unnecessary filling of our landfills.