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Self-quoting here because Lama just sent our an email saying they're picking up a Canadian core brand... so Rocky, Devinci, Norco...?
Going out on a limb and guessing Devinci based on the QC connection
That would be smart for Devinci too.
It gives them an outlet for people who don’t have a dealer nearby to purchase the product more easily without disrupting their dealer network.
Honestly I'm not tracking them nearly closely enough. I never built a scraping engine because I never found a good "basket of bike goods" nor good place to track the underlying price.
I do feel it would be interesting for people in this thread to do just what you did and comment when they see a price increase. Obviously, its easiest when the company lists the "tariff surcharge" which won't always be the case.
I'm sure there is a better way to do this (with code), I just don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze for me considering all the other things I have going!
My latest mulling over the barbell effect and how it might apply to bikes. In essence, in this post I play with the idea that we're seeing a hollowing out of the middle, both with respect to company size and product pricing.
//Substack
//Blog
EDIT: I've given @sspomer permission to post any of my stuff in full here so you don't have to click through to anything. Plus, I'm totally cool with him editing it (which I very likely need). If you all want me to aim at anything specifically for next week just let me know!
Great read, and a pretty brief effective summary. Sadly... I agree with your analysis. Sad because middle is nice, and extremes are tough. But yeah.
Nice read, and I think in the future you'll be able to extrapolate this theory out even further with the hollowing out of the middle class.
PS, fuck Marc Andressen. He is a parasite who is part of the intentional collapse of America in an attempt to move toward corporate fiefdoms AKA "Network States". Marc quotes Nick Land in his "Techno-Optimist Manifesto". Land is blatant racist whose ideas include "hyper-racism" (literally).
Thanks for reading!
I’m not trying to launch into a full on mega post on A16z or Marc, but I’ll say this: we’re better off when we can take ideas we like from people and leave the ones we don’t. I’ve yet to meet anyone I agree with 100% or anyone who hasn’t put their foot in their mouth at some point.
Marc can be tone-deaf (like myself), sure, but he also helped create the modern internet browser and has been one of the most influential capital allocators of our time. He's also a guy who has incredible vision for "what could be", the intelligence to make it so and the agency to work toward it. Yes, he's powerful and yes he has a lot of influence, but I'm not sure that is unique to Marc. Seems most all the rich dudes in SV have this sort of outsized influence, and frankly that just flat seems how capitalism works.
Personally, I’ve learned a lot from him and Ben. Does that make me a bad guy for taking value where I see it, even if the source is sometimes imperfect? I don’t think so, after all I most certainly am imperfect myself. But fair enough if others feel differently.
Those wondering what we're referencing, here is the blog post in question - while it doesn't pertain to bikes directly, this "vision" of the future is worth mulling over in a sci-fi kind of way (at least to me).
@jeff.brines any guesstimates of where the handle of the barbell begins and ends, is there a certain company size small enough that should still make it or big enough to be big enough?
Also, after the industry goes through a barbellification, is there any way to get to the big company size?
Good read. The only issue I have with this idea is that the makeup of the mtb consumer population is different from say the general shopping population which are looking for mid-priced goods. If I were to speculate, it's that we will see a shift away from the high end product towards mid-end product for the reasons you've laid out. We already see that sentiment here in the forums, on new product launch articles, with fatigue over electronics taking over from their mechanical siblings, or the swing back to high end alloy components over their carbon counterparts.
Mountain Bikers that are active, participants in the sport are lowering their ideal value proposition but because the sport is mostly based on wants over needs, they also recognize how low they are willing to go. You won't find an XT consumer all of a sudden saying to themselves "You know what? Maybe all I need is Deore".
That value threshold for complete bikes used to be around $4-5k usd not that long ago and crept up quite quickly to $6-7k. There will be a return to those $5k price points now that the value proposition is rock solid there and offers diminishing returns above it.
I'm sure Marc is vastly more intelligent than myself, but he's also a malignant narcissist whose vision of the of the future is terrifying if you dig into it. He doesn't explicitly state it in his manifesto, but he's clearly all in on accelerationism and the Neo-Reactionary (NRX) movement AKA the "Dark Enlightenment".
Tech billionaires are attempting to trying to destroy America and rebuild what they are calling "Network States", which are essentially corporate fiefdoms. This is part of the reason why they are trying to sell off public lands. They need land (and farm land) to accomplish this.
https://thenetworkstate.com/
This is a great summation of of the ideas extrapolated below, and it was released 2 months BEFORE Trump got elected, predicting everything that is happenign now. Ex. Curtis Yarvin's "RAGE - Retire All Government Employees":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no&ab_channel=BlondePolitics%7CTheSillySerious
Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen are heavily influenced by Curtis Yarvin, so much so that he's even been referred to as Thiel's "in-house philosopher." Here is is blog under his pen name "Mencius Moldbug":
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/
If you spend even a bit of time reading his "essays" and watching some of his interviews, his views are atrocious and are exactly what's playing out with Trump and Project 2025 right now. He is a blatantly racist and sexist ignoramus that believes democracy needs to be destroyed and replaced with autocracy, literally he wants a monarchy.
Here is Marc Andreessen's manifesto:
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
Marc makes specific references to Nick Land, a blatant racist whose ideas include "hyper-racism":
"Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance."
I hate to even spread their tripe around, but it's all out there in the open. These people want to fashion a society with unlimited "freedom"--not for you and me, but freedom for the rich to do anything they want with no repercussions. And you can be sure that includes some absolutely heinous crimes against humanity.
Thiel's essay "The Education of a Libertarian" speaks about the elimination of democracy specifically:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
"Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." -Peter Thiel
Thiel hired J.D. Vance to work for his global investment firm in 2017, and donated $15 million to his 2022 Ohio senate campaign, breaking a record for a senate campaign contribution. What do you think Thiel's ultimate goal for Vance is?
As a whole, this hyper capitalist, techno-feudualist, dystopian movement is referred to as Accelerationism, "The Dark Enlightment", and/or Neo-Reactionary (NRx).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
"Accelerationism is a range of ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations."
The "Dark Enlightment" directly opposes egalitarianism and democracy. These people are ultra narcissists who believe they are vastly superior to everyone else. The only thing they care about is increasing wealth, and achieving a "technological singularity". All of these ideas and players are intertwined.
Further reading:
https://www.thenerdreich.com/
https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism
https://theplotagainstamerica.com/
Love the graphs and graphics. Like an outdoor sports version of Scott Galloway. chefs kiss
Shimano getting rid of SLX is def a sign of the barbell effect.
I can't reply to this without derailing the thread into something I don’t intend. I also don’t care to 'defend' all Marc’s ideas, implied, explicit, or otherwise. Giant waste of time, even if I do feel you are painting him in a light that isn't totally accurate.
The point I was making is that I’m not going to do mental gymnastics to ensure every author, economist, professor, VC, CEO, or personality passes some arbitrary moral or ethical purity test to be worth including here.
At its best, this is a thread of ideas with application to the economics of the bike industry. If an idea is good (like the barbell effect, in my view), I’ll write about it and apply it to bikes. If it’s not, I’ll omit it. And as noted, the barbell effect isn’t Marc’s - it’s just something he’s applied in a few creative ways (VC fund size, attention economy) that I found accurate.
I’m not trying to be critical of you. Honestly, I’d love to have a beer and chop this up in a friendly way. I just know I can’t do it over text or in this thread without going off the rails.
Cheers!
so who are the riders of the apocalypse of the bike industry?
I understand your point, and I'm not really trying to be critical of you citing his relevant economic ideas. The info dump I posted above is just too important not to post anywhere and everywhere that intelligent people can read and understand it. On the surface it all sounds like some meth addict conspiracy theory, but these people are out in the open talking about their plans, and not nearly enough people are aware of it.
I'll stop derailing the thread now.
Giant has some killer deals on clearance bikes right now (2022 Stance 299 for $800!?). I just picked up my first fat bike yesterday, a Yukon 1 for $800 ($922 out the door). I love Giant as a value brand so hopefully their inventory levels are normalizing. They've had some rough revenue readouts lately.
I’m seconding the motion to rename this thread to be more general and inclusive of the bike industry at large — BikeBiz or Bikeconomics or BikeBoomBust etc
This thread is going to outlive the 12-24 month timeframe and it’s not ALL doom, more doom adjacent.
I can't help but wonder if getting ride of SLX was based on SKU reduction or if the production costs were too close to XT to justify having both....
The value gap was too narrow between Deore and XT. Deore did everything SLX did at a lower cost, and XT spec kept getting pushed down because the name (and product of course) holds a ton of value for customers.
Shimano got rid of a component level because there was too much similarity between the groups, many parts basically just had different paint and pricing. Arguably having too many groups can result in there being too many bike models, which gets the bike industry in trouble.
Once a physical component set was eliminated, the decision on which name to retain remained, it's just the name.
Deore is a name they've used since the 80's, it's a name which begat Deore XT (still in use for MTB ), which begat XTR (still in use for MTB ).
The SLX name had only been around since 2008, the name was begotten from LX (which is no longer in use).
I'd imagined that Deore is the lowest of the high end on the barbell, that Tourney is the highest of the low end. So is Cues the middle?
Bring back Mountain LX! 🤣
Mountain-LX was an Exage group.
Exage was basically what Cues is now - right in the middle of the barbell!
I vote closing and archiving this thread at precisely 4:03pm PST on October 3, 2025, and then starting a new one. Still 37 days left to see more companies shut down, people!
With respect to Shimano... I think points that it was too close to either Deore or XT from Tim and Ken are valid, especially considering both of those guys' experience having to come up with bike specs at various pricepoints. Looking back, I really didn't see that many full SLX bikes offered. Deore, XT, and SRAM drivetrains were common on spec sheets - seemed like that one was often skipped.
I also think Brian's correct in that Shimano had way too many damn SKUs in mountain now that we have LINKGLIDE, HYPERGLIDE and the proliferation of mountain DI2 all offered at the same time. Gone are the days of a simple DEORE to XTR mountain lineup with a mild differentiation between XTR race and XTR trail.
Looks like Specialized is taking your advice of "be deliberate with how you are positioning a product in the market".
https://www.specialized.com/us/en/vado-sl-2-ltd-s-racing/p/4293307?color=5465426-4293307
So much… it’s just too… ÜBER cringe.
It must kind of fun to try and write the cringiest nonsense-copy though:
“Thank God some kids stayed in science club, because while you were cutting school, they were learning how to manipulate the laws of physics. Some of those kids grew up to be members of Specialized Science Club and helped make the Vado SL 2 an unprecedented combination of power, speed, and light weight.”
Gross.
Now I want a Rivendell.
Ha, that thing would be fun AF if I still had an urban commute.
One of the reasons I think Jeff's right about the barbell theory of pricing is that there's so much stinking money out there at the top end of the tax brackets right now.
There's a shocking amount of people who live in Makebelieveland and are just looking, itching, for new ways to burn money. There are so many people for whom a $10000 Vado Sl 30 pound e-bike is a rounding error. And for people like this, having the newest, the most expensive, or the most exclusive can serve as the entire USP for a product purchase. Bike companies will continue bending over backwards to come up with new ways to charge more for products to sell to these customers, even if the average user (or even advanced users) can be wildly satisfied by the performance of an entry level bike.
If I were buying a complete MTB at MSRP today, I'd definitely be looking at a Deore or NX bike and I'd plan to buy a few strategic upgrades right away. There's no way I'm dropping $7000 on an XT or GX bike, even if I know I'd like it a little bit more. The juice isn't worth the squeeze when I can get 95% of the fun from 50% of the price.
On the other hand, this guy doesn't want to buy a $7000 XT bike because his friends might think he's poor:
And as long as mountain bikes are still enjoying their cultural moment of being cool again, there's an unlimited army of this guy.
I for one am just glad the industry pulled itself out of SRAM SX hell, and we have so many Deore 12 speed options.
The fact that covid happened right around the tail end of the whole SRAM SX thing may have done a huge disservice to beginners learning to ride lol
We maybe could have avoided all of this if people got Deore (or maybe even CUES) entry level bikes instead of SX in 2020. People probably thought 'wow, these mountain bikes STILL can't shift just like the one I had as a kid 20 years ago'. Here, I found a photo of society if people weren't forced to ride SRAM SX on their first/entry level bike.
Not sure if this is racing chat or YT bankruptcy discussion... but it sounds like the fancy YT truck is not at the race this weekend. Wonder why...
(should have transferred it to ownership by YT US before the bankruptcy... there's some kind of joke in here somewhere, about YT selling the race truck to stay afloat but the owner keeping every one of his toys, hm)
"While you were partying, I ̶s̶t̶u̶d̶i̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶d̶e̶ designed an electric road bike."
As for the loss of SLX, there was too much fragmentation going on even in Shimano's four "serious" MTB groupsets. Each added feature was a new product level. Chances are if you want one of the features of XT that Deore doesn't have, you want all of them.
SLX did have the nicest paint colour though, so that's a shame.
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