Welcome to the new rants page.

Some subjects in the mountain bike world are a bit emotive, well Flat Eric likes a good rant and has had one, read what he has to say below.

THE PRICE OF ELITISM by Flat Eric

Whilst re-immersing myself in the retail minefield of the Mountain Bike world after a 5 year absence, it was with some shock that I came to realise a decent quality entry-level bike would set me back about £400 for starters, rising rapidly up to £3000 - £4000 for an exotic high performance full suss beast. I had set myself an arbitrary £400 budget to get back into the sport, and was expecting to be able to get some mid to high end lightweight XC hardtail for that. In exasperation I turned to the second-hand market where I was soon rewarded.

Being a gadget fiend, however, my head was soon turned by the rows of bright and shiny things adorning the shelves of the local bike shops; braided cables, disc brakes, titanium bolts, carbon fibre composite bar ends, mini multitools, the list goes on and on. It seemed that, more so than other sports, the steep rise to the plateau of high performance is an extremely costly exercise.

Is it really worth paying nearly £300 for a pair of hydraulic disc brakes, for example? (I use this example as it is a common, contentious and possibly inflammatory one to cite). Do they stop you £300 better than old V-brakes? No doubt they look great, they demand a joule or two less energy from your fingers to activate them, they give more pleasing 'feedback' and they clog less in extreme mud. But have you ever suffered a bad accident due to insufficient operation of v-brakes that the upgrade to discs could have avoided? There will no doubt be one rare occasion out of 1000 of us that might say,"well yes, actually, it has, thank you for asking." but I'm sure the majority answer will be negative.

But be warned, if you answer the question "No", then you are admitting you are not one of the serious contenders for on-the-extreme-edge riding, those elitist athletes that can actually appear to justify the high cost of all their gear, rather than one of the Sunday afternoon wannabees that is past the age of aspiring to these sorts of dedicated heights. To be welcomed into this hard-core fold, it can often be enough to have purchased 'all the right gear', see it as a basic admission fee to an exclusive club. If it looks the part and is deemed cool then it can be accepted by the style priests of the MTB community and is thus well worth justifying the cost. 'Fashioned from a single billet of Aluminium' is one of my favourites. Yippee. Where's the test data that shows it's three times the strength as the ordinary one and thus three times the cost. There's a pair of bike shoes selling in the market at the moment using the feature of 'titanium sole' to justify it. Is there a stiff and lightweight plate of metal built in for mysterious extra performance? Well not exactly, but the plastic sole does have titanium dioxide pigment in it, the standard white pigment used in emulsion paint, which gives it a greyish colour. Whoopee-do. (Some golf ball manufacturers also use exactly the same feature to justify an extra £1.50 cost per box above 'normal' balls.)

This is an all-too-common ruse used by marketeers to justify high prices exploiting some basic technical ignorances of a product-hungry cash-rich customer base. A customer base that also associates deep technical knowledge of this kind with the negative connotations of nerd or geekism. They know one thing many of us don't think about, as it's often taken for granted; Emotional appeal sells far stronger than rational appeal. I put it to you, m'lud, that this fact helps to explain the exorbitant prices of most sexy gear items in the MTB world. People want to aspire to a perceived elitism by having the right gear far more than the perceived rational benefit to their own riding it affords.

If you doubt the power of the emotional over the rational, look at George W Bush, and the support he rallies in his own countrymen after the Twin Towers atrocity. There's a prime example, he's not selling himself on rational ideas about economy, he's selling himself on fear, fear that the ordinary American might actually face problems on their own turf for once or have their beloved lifestyle disrupted (If the US stopped for a minute to examine the rational side and what a dreadful state their economy had crept into over the last few years, he'd be out on his ear immediately).

Luckily for him, the level of his message was pitched just low enough for the majority of his countrymen to digest.

Back to mountain bikes for a minute more; Does this appealing to the emotional rather than the rational side actually matter? Well not really, the companies will continue selling at the best price they can get people to buy at. If people have the money and they perceive the value of the item as good, it will be sold, and if it makes you feel good, then you're happy with it. Indeed some items sell better because of the perceived quality, an Omega watch tells exactly the same time as a Swatch, but if the Omega was priced at £19.99 you'd think it was a knock off or fake, stolen or about to break. Halfords bike £159.99, can't be much good for that. We all do it!

So are you getting good value for money when you buy expensive upgrade items for your bike? Will you spend an extra £75 to get a 5 ounce weight saving? (I can save £3.49 and avoid an extra 2lb weight gain by avoiding Macdonalds a little more often) No, I don't think you are, I think the prices are elevated often beyond all proportion by this desire for elitism, but as long as we all enjoy ourselves in the sport/hobby, then that has to be the most important thing at the end of the day. People with cash to burn, carry on buying, and keep those prices high for the rest of us to suffer!

Next month: Life the universe and spline fettling.

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