Planet bikes in Woolloongabba wanted to charge me $26 for a pair of no-name brake inserts not even in packaging. I got a pair of cool stops for $10 from Wiggle instead. Tell me how that works?
i think youd find a store that tried to do that would soon find it couldnt get any proper stock locally and would develop a pretty bad rep amongst other retailers. theres enough industry representation on any bike forum for that to not go unnoticed.
so yeah, youd have one weekend (or week or maybe a month) of good sales and then youd have neighbouring stores and australian distros hating you. business fail.
not to mention the legal ramifications of parallel importing. :-o
dont forget that when we buy from OS we dont pay import duties or any sales taxes… you bring enough volume in and you’ll find that you wont escape customs notice.
as sime says, theres a lot more to a shop than just how much is on the price sticker (which is often not what you pay for it).
Feel your pain - broke a spoke a few weeks ago just around the corner from them so dropped in and got a replacement DT Champion for $2 - fair price I think for a one off.
Building up a weird new set of wheels last week - ordered the DT Champion spokes from the bike shop at the top of my street and they ordered the size in and gave them to me at 50 cents each - too cheap, but that is the value my local bikeshop put on my spend.
(They didn’t carry 278mm spokes as they are a specialist mtb /bmx shop)
When building the wheels I realised that I needed half the spokes on the front wheel to be 2mm longer so dropped down to Planet - the same bloke served me and this time charged me $3 each for the 12 DT Champions I wanted. (I wanted to finish the wheelbuild that day and thought they would have the size in stock).
The back wheel also needed spokes 2mm different, but I thought might have needed to be 2mm shorter due to the flanges being closer so only did one wheel at a time - needless to say went somewhere else for the back wheel spokes.
I know that any bike shop can’t be everything to everybody, and I will go to different places that I know can supply stock depending on what I want - road, mtb, track or bmx.
Value has to be placed though on the bike shop that will look after you without taking the piss - the day I bought those $3 spokes, I dropped into a small nondescript bike shop whilst my son was playing cricket, and he offered to chop and thread spokes to the size I wanted for $2.50 each
I recon generally bike gear is cheaper in the UK (don’t know much about US market).
The decent bike shops in London could compete with wiggle, PBK, ribble and parker int. Unless you were going for bulk deals, or they had free shipping the price wasn’t a big difference. The online store have a wide range though, and often you could pick up specials or last years stock at good prices.
I find the price of tyres in Oz crazy! I buy conti’s 4 seasons in the uk for 25 quid (50 au…). I see they retail (in store) in Oz for over 100 au. Maybe Im shopping in the wrong part of town.
Speaking to the semi pro riders in the UK, they get loads of quality gear given to them. The same thing doesn’t seem to happen with semi pro continental Europe riders.
yep, even before the dollar got strong, bike gear was still much cheaper in london…
The big issue for LBSs is that, the list price on the likes of Wiggle, Chainreaction, PBK is actually cheaper than what they can get it for from distributors… The problem really all has to do with the size of our market - the US, UK can order in big quantities, which brings prices drastically down. With only a smidgeon of the population, we in australia pay a massive premium.
I know quite a few lbs’s who reckon more and more they will turn to solely servicing…
It’s sad, but the reality of the situation means the disparity in prices is so extreme you’re an absolute idiot to buy anything from an LBS.
i think a certain wheel company here in Oz really need to have a re-think on their pricing…(if thats possible)
If i can sit right here on the comfort of my lounge, order a set of what ever color i wish,machined or not, shipped from the U.S! & delivered to my door cheaper than i could get them off my local bike shop, 500m up the road…For an Australian made product!!! :roll:
As it was said in another thread(i think)…How much jet fuel does it take to get a set of these rims delivered??
Especially now with what is the ‘fixed gear bicycle craze’ happening where these rims are of somewhat of a demand…
Tis just silly…
Too many black balloons gettin involved…
Velocity do not set their retail prices, apparently. GOOSE can explain.
But yeah, hard to understand how transporting wheels across the world and back still comes out cheaper than walking down the road to your LBS.
Welcome to the market economy! :mrgreen:
not trying to be harsh, but this has been done to death on here.
you can blame (to varying degrees, and with other factors):
- economies of scale
- local retail markup
- international supply and demand
or simply say - do you blame your corner store for being more expensive than ALDI/costco/bi-lo? (i know theres more to it than that - but let’s keep it simple for the kids shall we?)
What gives me this royal shits is that we are ‘told’ that we now live in a global economy. That means I have to compete for work with people in India and Russia, who work for less than 5USD an day. Yet if I look at saving a bit of money (so if I lose my job to someone in India I can still eat) by buying stuff from OS I am a bad person. FFS!
I know for a fact that some importers make a killing here in Australia, so don’t give that ‘economies scale’ BS. Remember we live in the global economy! Having your cake and eating as well is not not ‘Australian’.
I have supported my LBS in the past and I continue today. I have even been told to buy stuff online in the past by my LBS because they were getting dicked around by a certain distributor.
There are some quality importers in Australia, but there are some that need to get their act together in the ‘Global Economy’ that we live in.
My local green grocer/butcher is much cheaper than ALDI/costco 
plus, aldi and costco sell horrible shit, wiggle has a bigger better range than the LBS and its still much cheaper.
They have their place :evil:
just like an LBS
I’m not going to argue with you on this. The ‘economies of scale’ was one point of many as an explanation of what i’ve seen as causes for the higher prices. The US gets and sells many shipping containers of the rims, the australian market does not. they can arrange/demand/whatever a cheaper wholesale price and then with a smaller markup on accessories over there it results in a cheaper price to the customer. its obviously not that simple… but it remains a factor in the reduced online price (of not only rims, it also applies to many other items). when the B43 was released i think i remember GOOSe saying that the first container was destined for the US, only a very select group of shops got any from the first batch.
as to the local greengrocer/butcher example - i totally agree. through review of your local options its pretty easy to find cheaper and better produce than the chains, and often the relationships formed are much better and result in better service/product selection/prices.
my preferred LBS was closed for a week so i had to go to a big one
$30 for bar tape, piss off but yeah ok ill suck it up as i want it now
go in there, find it myself, compare what they have, etc etc, take up not one second of their precious time
go to the counter and i have to practically beg them to take my money and sell the shit to me, staff should not require prompting to complete a sale
go fuck yourself LBS
a LBS is only worthwhile if you go there often enough for them to know you and start giving you some attention/advice/discounts/freebies.
i’m getting some wheels built at my local place and all of a sudden i get things like chainring bolts for free. made me feel pretty special, at least for a second, until i realised how much i’m going to be giving them for the wheels.
Not Bike Bar at Bondi by any chance? I had a similar experience there, now I yell at the shop whenever I ride past.
I’m pretty lucky to have two awesome local bike shops, and I try and get as much shit from them as possible. At the end of the day, as cool as they are to hang out with or as rad as it is they have a BB tool, I’m not going to pay $65 for a gatorskin when I can get two for that in under 6 days.
I think people forget GST when it comes to prices here. As I understand, when products come in the importer is subject to GST. Then at the wholesaler they are subject to GST. Then, again, at the bike shop, they are subjected to GST. That’s a compounding (my maths is shit) 30%?
And on the subject of Velocity, my old LBS was exactly 1 minute and 30 seconds drive from THEIR FACTORY. Don’t give me this global economy bullshit.
I’m not convinced that the GST triple dips like that, but if it did it would be 33.1% extra
Oh it does and it sucks.
No it doesn’t.