If you’ve been doing bikes for awhile, your biggest challenge may be reducing how many you own.
However, incredible as it may seem, if you’re a normal person there’s a good chance you’re actually looking to get a new bike. Crazy, right? Well it’s true. And as it happens, I was looking at the Path Less Pedaled YouTube channel recently and happened to notice in his store that he’ll schedule a new bike consultation session with you for $100:
Now, to be clear, I have absolutely no problem with people charging other people for their valuable time or raising money so they can keep cranking out free bike content. He also rides lots and lots of bikes and tries lots and lots of equipment, so he’s got a lot more first-hand experience with a wide variety of products than the typical idiot on Reddit. Most importantly, people are free to spend their money however they want, and there are way, way worse things you can do with $100, like buying a bunch of crack, or five copies of Greta Thunberg’s “The Climate Book.”
At the same time, these are people watching Path Less Pedaled, not GCN. Given this, 45 minutes seems like a long time to tell someone to just by a Rivendell already and be done with it:
Yeah, I know. But which Rivendell? Well, the suckers out there in Walnut Creek will probably tell you that for free:
Suckers.
Of course, it’s all too easy to sit back and say how simple it is to decide on a new bicycle when you’ve been riding for awhile and you’ve already got lots of bikes yourself. In fact, today’s bike consumer is so overwhelmed by choice that it’s no surprise they’d be willing to give someone $100 to figure it all out for them. Take gravel bikes, the kind of bicycle everyone’s telling everyone else to get:
Yeah, I don’t think the bike is the problem there.
Regardless, to put myself in their shoes (does the $100 cover shoes or is that a whole new consultation?), I plugged the term “gravel bikes under $2,000” into a popular search engine. What came up? A story on a bike website for desert gentrifiers called “2024 Metal Gravel Bikes Under and Around $2,000.”
I’d link to it, but that’s now a premium service on this blog, and the price is $100.
Anyway, the story featured 28 bikes. Twenty-eight bikes. All of them were nearly identical. I guess some were steel and some were aluminum, and some had one chainring and some had two, but that was about it. So how many possible choices is that?
Steel double
Steel single
Aluminum double
Aluminum single
And that’s it! How does the bike industry manage to squeeze 28 bikes out of that? You could cover the entire spectrum of cycling, from pennyfarthing to e-assist full suspension mountain bike, with fewer than 28 bikes. Meanwhile, some poor schmuck looking to buy a gravel bike under $2,000 has to choose from among 28 that look exactly like this:
That particular bike is a Vaast, ye matey. Specifially it’s the “Vaast A1X2GRX.” Got that? Of course you don’t. Now you’re beginning to understand why you’d want to outsource this project to a YouTuber. Not only are there too many goddamn gravel bikes, but the naming conventions are way too complicated. Either the name needs to be painfully rustic, or else a meaningless jumble of consonants and numbers. And that goes for the races too, by the way. What the fuck is this one? I assume that means Sore Butt Gravel:
Oh well, doesn’t matter, it’s already sold out. See, the defining characteristic of gravel races is that they’re always sold out.
And those are just the bikes made out of metal! No doubt there are crabon gravel bikes under and around $2,000 on top of that, at which point the poor, tortured consumer now has to agonize over whether they want a bike made from metal or from plastic. Then you get to listen to brobags like this:
In light of all this, giving Path Less Pedaled guy $100 to spare you from it all sure seems like a bargain. But even that’s just leaping out of the frying pan, because then Path Less Pedaled guy has to tell you not only about Rivendell, but also about the 50 other bike companies out there that are basically Rivendells but with disc brakes. Assuming he goes in alphabetical order, by the time you’re 45 minutes run out you’ll barely be through the Crusts.
Fuck it, I’m buying a pennyfarthing.