By John Marsh, Editor & Publisher
No Issue Next Week – Interbike
As Jim Langley mentioned in his pre-Interbike Tech Talk column last week, next week is the annual cycling-industry extravaganza where all manner of companies display their wares. We’ll be taking the week off from publishing RBR Newsletter to pound the show floor, looking at new (and we hope, innovative) gear, bikes, apparel, and such so thatwe can report on the latest, and best of it after the show and throughout the next year as we do product reviews and monitor the trends we spot.
For those of you who use Facebook, we’ll be posting some of the eye-catching things we see next Wednesday and Thursday from the show.
For those who don’t, not to worry. We’ll be back on the 29th with a new issue of RBR Newsletter in which we’ll give you our top-of-mind impressions of the show, followed by specific rundowns of some of our favorite products and trends in successive issues.
Update on Recent Questions of the Week
Once again, color me surprised at the responses to a related pair of recent Questions of the Week.
Two weeks ago, we asked:
How Much is Your (Everyday) Road Bike Worth? Best Guesstimate.
Thinking in terms of what I consider to be the verging-on-crazy price range of quality road bikes these days, I expected the responses to this question to be firmly in the middle of the range I laid out in the Question – from “Less than $1,500 (USD)” at the low end to “$6,500 to $7,500” at the high end. (I did offer a couple of “outlier” choices, too: “$7,500 to $10,000”, “$10,000 to $15,000” and “More than $15,000.”)
Boy, was I wrong!
55% of the almost 1,000 of you who voted did so nearly equally across the three lowest-price responses:
- 18.9% voted “Less than $1,500”
- 18.6% voted “$1,500 to $2,500”
- 17.8% voted “$2,500 to $3,500”
From there it dropped down drastically.
- 11.6% voted “$3,500 to $4,500”
- 9.3% voted “$4,500 to $5,500”
The next-largest voting bloc, at 6.9%, voted “$7,500 to $10,000” – and 56 voters have bikes worth $10,000 or more.
But those numbers didn’t seem so out of whack when I considered the nearly 1,200 responses to the related Question:
How Old is Your Everyday Road Bike? (Approx. age for Franken-Bikes)
- 27.5% voted “More than 10 years old.”
- 16.6% voted “7-10 years old.”
- 13.2% voted “5-7 years old.”
So, considering that the vast majority of us (nearly 60%) have everyday bikes that were purchased a good while ago, the value question comes into better perspective.
Just to round out the voting, and see the correlation to votes for higher price ranges in the value question, here’s how the rest voted:
- 17.2% voted “2-3 years old.”
- 16.7% voted “3-5 years old.”
- 6.7% voted “Less than 1 year old.”
John Marsh is the former editor and publisher of RBR Newsletter and RoadBikeRider.com. A rider of "less than podium" talent, he brought our readers consistently useful, informative, entertaining info that helps make them better road cyclists. That's what we're all about here—always have been, always will be. Click to read John's full bio.
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