This is the most ridiculous thing I've read in months:
When I arrived in Portland last month, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do. Since I wouldn’t be in town for too long, and it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to take the bike with me when I left, I wanted something extremely cheap.If you check the web, WalMart sells lots of adult bikes and has some for less than $100 and lots for around $120-$130, brand new bikes! A quick check shows 3 stores in Portland.
There were bike shops on every other corner in Southeast Portland, the sort of Brooklyn-ish neighborhood where I was staying. I walked into what looked like the grungiest of them — a store that sold mostly used bikes. There was one employee, and he was heavily tattooed and seemed pretty cool. I completely leveled with him: I didn’t know anything about bikes, really; I could barely change a tire; I was only going to be in town for a little while; and I wondered if he had something cheap that I could use for puttering around town.
I know this is sort of quaint, but the last time I bought a bike, I think I spent $35 and it wasn’t hot. It was a road bike; it had 18 speeds, I think; it squeaked; and it served my needs (biking from my house to school every day) perfectly well. (The bike later died a peaceful death at Burning Man, but that was due to maltreatment, not poor quality.) I was looking for something like that.
The guy in the store asked me how much I wanted to spend.
I sort of stuttered my way and ultimately refused to answer the question because I was embarrassed to say something like “less than a hundred dollars,” for fear of coming off like Borat inspecting the Hummer before buying the ice-cream truck.
Yeah, the bike guy answered, he had something super-cheap for me, an old road bike that they’d fixed up. It wasn’t exactly my size, but it would do. It was a 1991 model, a Trek, I think. It was in good working condition, it had some newer components, and it came with a warranty. I could have it, he said, for $475.
So I went to another store. Same deal, more or less. There was one bike for $275, but it was a girl’s Raleigh from the 1960’s with a wicker basket.
I started looking around the web. At the down-to-earth-sounding Recyclery, another Portland used bike shop — and probably a great one — there are currently 59 used bikes on offer. But 34 of them cost more than $1,000, only eight are priced under $500, and there are none under $300. Even to rent a bike for one week from the Recyclery costs $175 — more than I paid for my weekly rental car the previous time I was in Portland.
...
I asked a few people in town about this and got some general sense of agreement and common frustration: cheap bikes are impossible to find around here. The word on the street was that so many people are selling their cars (or taking their cars off the road) and using bikes to commute to work that there just aren’t enough bikes to go around.
China makes most of the bikes in the world. I can't imagine with the economic slowdown that it would be difficult for WalMart to bring in say 10,000 bikes for sale. So how can this Robin Goldstein character make the claim that there is a "shortage" of bikes?
This article is complete hogwash. It makes no sense. It may be an entertaining read, but it should be clearly marked as "fiction". I question: what is it doing on a site supposedly dedicated to "economics"?
2 comments:
Um, if you read the whole article, Goldstein makes exactly the point you do! The section that you left out with the "..." says the following:
"At Portland’s Costco, meanwhile—on the outskirts of the city—you can buy a brand-new Schwinn Midtown city bike with Shimano shifters for two hundred something dollars. But, according to the clerk there, those Schwinns aren’t moving.
I don’t doubt that the Schwinn Midtown is a far inferior bike, from the point of view of a bike connoisseur, to whatever’s being sold used in Portland. But you’ve got to love a city whose citizens put a set of moral/aesthetic principles—whether it’s riding a bike with proper disc brakes or refusing to support the Big Box stores—this far above their own financial well-being. And although every city has its bike aficionados, I think that in Portland, most people just buy rebuilt bikes locally because it feels right to do so, not because all these everyday bike riders can really tell the difference between Shimano TX-30 derailleurs and M-970 XTRs."
His point is a lot more sophisticated than your interpretation of it: that there is a shortage *of used/artisanal* bikes in Portland--the bikes the locals want to buy.
I can see your interpretation as a possibility. But I don't buy it because I take the words as they are written. So I don't think Robin Goldstein and I are making the same point.
When Robin Goldstein writes "cheap bicycle" I don't think "used/artisanal". I guess I'm just showing my unsophisticated roots. I saw the bit about Schwinn's for $200 at Costco. But when WalMart has a bike for $89, I think a $200 bike is upscale and meant as an emblem of status and not the simple transportation item that Robin Goldstein claims to want: "I wanted something extremely cheap." If "used/artisanal" is $200 and up, then in my simple mind that doesn't translate as "cheap" which is a word that Robin Goldstein used to describe the desired bike.
When Robin Goldstein writes "the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do" then I read this as pedaling to go from point A to B, not to make some cultural statement about "artisanal/used". But I can see your point. While I stressed "get around" you put the stress on "the way the locals do". Where cheap transportation to me means utility, you see discretionary income spent "cheaply" to achieve a lifestyle that aspires to match rims and pedals and hood ornaments with the locals.
I'm an unsophisticate. You've caught me out. I plead guilty. So I missed that "sophisticated" subtext in the article.
I guess I still hold some rage down inside because when I was a graduate student 40 years ago managing on very meager funds and riding my used one-speed bike to/from university, those sophisticates of "artisanal" bikes entertained themselves by coming alongside and pushing me off my bike. They were bored rich kids. While I was left fearing for my life, I had a hard time appreciating the "moral/aesthetic" lesson these upscale youths were trying to teach me. I guess I lost my love for "artisanal" at that very point in my life. For me, a bike is a bike is a bike. Or am I getting to poetical? I don't want to get too "sophisticated".
But my point about this posting on Freakonomics is still valid. This was a ridiculous article to be put on the Freakonomics site. It said nothing of interest about economics. It belongs in some glossy paged magazine targeted to entertain the jaded connoisseurs of an upscale market where transportation means Porsche or BMW with riffs about social position and a keen aesthetic of metal, plastic, and glass. Sorry, I belong to the Honda Civic crowd where transportation can be accurately translated as "transportation" and not "lifestyle statement" or "artisanal" anything.
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