Looking forward to embarking on a long career as a DT Swiss smuggler
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hadn’t they been practically closed for at least the last decade?
Every thing has been showing out of stock for years
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I’m assuming you didn’t have an account? I logged in last week and their inventory(that has been sitting on shelves for decades) was in stock like it always had been. My bet is, even with low overhead costs, selling overpriced new old stock bike nerd stuff wasn’t paying the bills and someone came in and bought everything.
Why would I create an account when nothing was in stock?
The consumer site never showed inventory. You needed a dealer login to show what was available, which a ton of rare NOS stuff still was.
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I had assisted a shop in getting an EAI acct and they got mad once I was using my personal cc for payment instead of a bike shop named one. This is where I got berthoud and honjo stuff before Jan was born
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I don’t understand why this article has struck a cord with some many people. It reads like someone in the industry who is exhausted by the industry, with little to do with the people actually buying the bikes who ostensibly would be the ones most affected by it’s subject.
Nobody has to be a part of any of the things being complained about?
2 Likes
I think the general term “marketing” is doing a lot of work for what the author is describing. There’s a lot of sales-oriented engineering and Big Business M&A happening, as has happened since the beginning, and putting the blame for dysphoria on expanded media budgets is sort of lazy.
Marketing also keeps a lot of people employed in the industry, for better or worse.
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Bikepacking.com only exists at the pleasure of the companies that use it to market new product. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing (or a good thing atmo) and I agree with the author about needless innovation to push sales, hyper-specialization, etc, but I hope they realize they’re instrumental in it all.
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Grant’s gonna have a 12,000 word Blagh post full of righteous vindication
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Yes and this child doesn’t understand how
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Social media definitely has a part, you are bombarded with ads for new this and that, when all you wanted was normal content of people going on rides. For zoomers it could be the only social network they know
We love to hate on xbiking but at least it’s something new and not exclusively driven by Big Bicycling to sell expensive bikes
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i’m sympathetic to the author but i think it’s worth considering the archival photos presented in the article. how many show people riding their bike? how many show people walking their bike?
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Has Riding Bikes Ruined Bikes?
One man’s discovery of a simpler time may show that your ride may be better off without the ride
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that’s just normal Brovet rules at play
you get the most opportunities to take pictures of your bros from cool vantage points when you yourself are not riding your bike, and they stay in your frame way longer if they’re not riding their bikes either
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it’s driven by big fender to sell big fenders
by nitto x company name here 
also baggy pants are in now, so bikes are are out
https://www.reddit.com/r/cycling/comments/1bex3io/how_do_you_bike_in_baggy_pants/
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I don’t really want to read that whole article but I think it’s a mistake to assume that people in old photos having Type 2 fun weren’t also obsessed with gear and getting more/better toys and that the woman pushing the tandem up the rocky mountain path isn’t an outlier in any decade
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I used to drool over the chouinard catalog and thought rebranding to black diamond was a sell out. I have never been climbing.
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Article seemed to be saying ‘stop worrying about what bike you’re riding, just go ride somewhere.’ It’s the Grant Just Ride message.
But the whole thing is if you do that many times over years, and you have some awareness of the options available to you, you start to think ‘hey this would be more fun on a bike designed for the specific riding I’m doing.’ So you try that and it does indeed bring more enjoyment. Which the author sort of acknowledges toward the end.
cute pics tho.
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I didn’t read the article but my one di2 bike wouldn’t shift this morning because the battery is dead, so I will join the author in yelling at cloud.
I thought these were supposed to last months at a time!
5 Likes