gl1000honda3

Hi, I have noticed the same here in the great white north...Randy you can jump in anytime here?...IMO, the boomer push is on, there are many, many of us who grew up feeling what it was like going from single speed coaster to 10 speed zoom. I believe we just want to rekindle some past time that was precious in memory...Oh the freedom of the ride, on my first bike boom 10 speed..a 75.00 Black Knight, generic...not very high end...Priceless to me.

Ride...Ride Safe

gl1000honda3

One more FYI....

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Vintage-Origi...item2c6beeeb3d

Amazing and more amazing look at the price...This is where the boom is taking us...Shame really?

TimmyT 

Here

oddjob2

ODDJOB's TOP TEN REASONS C & V BIKES ARE HARD TO FIND:

1. Thrifty Bill and I are cornering the market! I have about a year's inventory of flippable bikes and I know Bill has more than I do.

2. Classic and vintage goods are hip among the young, particularly if it's shiny. I was at a New Years Eve party, where the twenty something guys were discussing their watch collections, both vintage and new, like women discuss shoes. BTW, these guys are not metrosexuals! One of the guy's girlfriend was into mid-century furniture and household goods in a big way (she has bought two C&V bikes from me).

3. Riding bikes is probably far more popular just in the last few years as cities become more bike friendly and boomer children enter their college years and work force. I've noticed around Ann Arbor that bike racks that used to be empty are now always nearly full at peak periods, and few if any of the bikes are newer than ten years. Did you notice that even the Obama motorcade did its inaugural drive in bike lanes absent in DC just a few years ago? High cost of automobile acquisition, parking, fuel, and insurance also delay the auto purchase for those entering an uncertain work place, so a bike is substitute transportation.

4. Except for beer commercials, you can't watch a TV ad that doesn't feature bicycles, whether pitching to retirees or hipsters. Think of all the pharmeceutical, travel, food, and even Toyota Venzana ads that feature bicycles.

5. Anyone shopping at an LBS or REI will quickly notice that decent bikes start at over $500, with CF road bikes starting at closer to $1200. New bike prices reinforce the value of that old bike hanging in the garage!

6. Old bikes are less attractive to bike thieves.

7. It is easier to recycle, with curbside recycling, recycling drop off centers, and cruising scrappers. If I put anything that a magnet sticks to out in the alley or curb, it is gone within 24 hours! The increasing population of OCD heads of households will immediately purge anything with rust or dirt on it as well.

8. With less homeowners cutting their own lawns and shoveling snow, there is more room inthe garage for things like bikes! There are also so many "off the floor" storage techniques now too.

9. Since everyone has wifi, 3G or 4G, deals can be struck in minutes, not days. I have been scooped inside of 20 minutes from ad posting time on more than one occasion.

10. There is more competition for them. Just think every metro craigslist has a few dominant DKO sellers who scour every garage sale, work with the eviction cleaning companies, etc. Also, there are more second hand stores and NFP storefronts like Goodwill, St. Vincent DePaul, and the plethora of McDonald's (Kroc family) sponsored Salvation Army stores. Also, there are many heartless part-out kings of ebay, who have love only for the $$$, not for the whole bike.

bbattle

And with people laying down long green on Varsitys, it's no wonder.

Refresco

True to the point that it is annoying to even speak to the people selling them.

I was looking at an old Nishiki... really low end and it was horribly rusted, steel wheels, lowest suntour components. I offered the guy 35$ and he said "No way, I've seen bikes like this [I guess he mean "old bikes"] go for 200$ or more!"

What does one even say to something like that?

rjhammett

Grady (Gomango) has bought up all the good bikes in the Twin Cities area.

thinktubes 

Aside from the comments about the ease of finding value, more venues for for selling, and increased numbers of people going after this stuff, I believe that the vast reserves of vintage bikes have been "mined-out" and moved on to collectors.

At this point, a bike from the 70's would have to been in the possession of the original owner for over 40 years. Anyone other than hardcore hoarders has disposed of their bike by this point. As time marches on, the numbers of these bikes gets smaller and smaller.

I've seen the same thing happen with all the vintage hobbies I have. It's been over 5 years since I've found a large stash (or any) vaccum tubes. Same thing with vintage stereo gear.

nlerner

Hmm, the OP seems to start this thread or its cousin every few months:

https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...ive?highlight=
https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...ale?highlight=
https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...ht!?highlight=
https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...ls!?highlight=

It's the Flippah' channel!

randyjawa 

As many of you know, I spend a fair amount of time collecting bicycles from the local landfill site, which I call The Dump. You would all crap at how many bicycles are pitched away each year. During the Spring, Summer and Fall, I have to make three trips per week, filling my truck each time, just to keep up.

I, personally, collect at least 300 bikes, each year, from The Dump and leave twice as many, or more, since I have no way to process more than I take for Bikes for Humanity. That means that our Dump in Thunder Bay gets, probably, about 1000 bikes pitched away each year. And Thunder Bay has a population of roughly 100,000 thousand people. Imagine how many bikes in a city representing 1,000,000 people would get pitched.

So, and my math will suck for reasons I won't go into here, if TB pitches 1000 bikes a year, the big city will pitch 10,000 per year.

Now, multiply that number by, let's say 1000, for all of the other 1,000,000 plus sized cities, and you start to get an idea of how many bicycles are scrapped annually, just in North America.

So, NA has traditionally been pitching 10,000 x 1000 = 10,000,000 bikes annually for, let's say, the past 20 years. The number is staggering, coming out at close to, if not more than, 200,000,000 bicycles in just twenty years(the Bike Boom took place 40 years ago). Again, I cannot do math well anymore so if the numbers don't add up, help out. Anyway...

Those bikes are gone!

What's left? What you see and you have not seen them all yet. But even so, I still get my 300 bikes per year from The Dump and leave at least as many. And, think about this...

We have not even taken all the smaller landfill sites into consideration. Again, the number of bikes destroyed is staggering.

Course, I could be wrong.

seedsbelize 

I won't even hope to understand how you did this.
But my contribution to the thread is that the emails I get from my Ebay watch list have tailed off dramatically in the past couple months. Shocking, really.

fender1

Maybe ride one of the MANY bikes you have, instead of complaining that you can't get more & more & more? Yep.

retyred

Hmmm... Lots of vintage bikes hanging around. One just needs to know where to look.

auchencrow

In short, you and Thrifty Bill are to blame.

I'll buy that!


edit: And Randy and Gomango too!

auchencrow

You had better not tell us where you live!

dbakl

How many are Cinellis?

ilikebikes

Well there you go! The crabon industry is gathering them up!

ilikebikes

YES! You said yourself the crabon industry is gathering them up! forcing us to buy their wares! Apparently they're feeding them to the crabs! They're scavengers! Come on man! Wake up to the reality! You tell everybody. Listen to me, auchencrow. You've gotta tell them! Crabs are C and V bikes! We've gotta stop them somehow!

Sixty Fiver

gomango

Absolutely correct.

.....and now I'm selling a few here and there.

That's how I can afford a new custom Dave Anderson for example.

With two boys heading off to college, I will somehow have to make do with 6-7 bicycles, not 26.

Seriously though, tuition for these two will set us back roughly $75,000 per year.

Not a lot of room for new bicycles for the next five years.

big chainring 

Just was looking at my local CL listings and found a dozen or so bikes I would buy. Grand Prix's galore, Gitane, Urago, Jeunet. About a hundo each. Not much meat on the bone for flipping, but plenty of good riders.
Better quality stuff is out there, just gotta dig for it. Making good business connections is key. I have several people calling me with their "finds".
It's all a big treasure hunt. Just more hunters now than a few years ago. Garbage pickers, estate sale hunters, metal scrappers, everyone looking for something to make a few bucks on. Of course now that we are on the road to economic recovery, how many years now?, we should be seeing more bikes available as the millions of unemployed go back to work. Yeah right!

auchencrow

Yup. Modern life is like a B-movie.

noglider 

Folks have raised lots of good points here.

I haven't noticed the trend, probably because I'm not paying attention.

Aaron is right. More people are traveling by bike. I don't know what exactly led to that trend, but it's true, which raises the value of used bikes and, according to the rule of supply and demand, also reduces the supply. Not necessarily in that order.

Information about used bikes has gotten plentiful and cheap, thanks to the internet, as fender1 points out. craigslist, ebay, bikeforums are the big players in spreading that information freely, but I'm sure a thousand other online media, with fewer subscribers each, also contribute to this increase in supply and decrease in value of information about used bikes.

Randy points out that there's a constant flow of bikes being tossed, but I think his extrapolation is flawed. Thunder Bay must either be short on space or a very well connected city. It seems that everyone knows that there's only one good place to toss your bikes, the dump. Here in the expansive suburbs, people have tons of space in their garages and basements, so bikes collect dust and hide from the population for years or decades. New Jersey and much of the rest of the east coast of the US has millions of contiguous square miles of suburbs, one butted against the next. You can travel for over a thousand miles through neither farms nor cities and stick to only suburbs. That's a heck of a lot of private garages and basements. People don't have a bike dump to the same degree that folks in Thunder Bay do. Most people haven't heard of bike coops.

oddjob2's summary is comprehensive and accurate! There are many reasons cited, all true, and they combine to shift the market.

But none of this will keep us off our bikes. (I'm assuming people here actually ride, though it seems that some of us mostly wrench or collect bikes.) And none of this will keep us from buying and trading bikes if we want to keep it up. We might pay more for old bikes, but we'll also be able to sell them, also at higher prices. There will always be people who under value things (whom we buy from) and there will always be people who overvalue them (whom we sell to). Whether it's worth the time and effort is another question. It's not for me, and I'm not sure it ever was, but I did it. No more for me. I have too many bikes and now have to sell them at a loss.

noglider 

That's because you haven't changed your saved searches. Start looking for the next thing that is both undervalued (by sellers) and overvalued (by buyers). The more you cruise the listings, the more you discover these things. I'm getting more alerts from ebay than before, and it's not because I'm buying or selling. I haven't bought or sold anything in a while.

skidder

Somewhat like randyjawa's response in #35 above: Here in California there are some pretty strict trash recycling laws that require stuff be diverted from landfills for recycling. In the suburbs/urban areas you usually ahve to go through a local trash compnay to get rid of your 'junk', either curbside pick-up or drop-off at the local trash collection yard. I occasionally drop off a big load at the local trash yard (yard re-landscape project, rebuild a fence, etc), and the staff there sorts what is dropped off. There's usually a BIG pile of scrap metal items with A LOT if bikes mixed into it. I've asked about picking out a few (seen names like Miyata, Raleigh, better Schwinns, etc in the pile), but there's a strict 'no trash-picking' rule. Sad to see all those great bicycles disappearing, but at least they're getting recycled (maybe into new Surlys, Redlines, etc?).

FWIW: I still find a few diamonds, but it depends on your local market. Best bet here in So Calif are older rigid MTBs; there are a regular stream of pretty nice, higher-end ones in great shape from the early 1990s that show up on Craigslist for $100-$150. Decent road bikes seem to disappear as fast as they get posted on CL.