Now that it is time to announce the winner of the Meh-Roica contest…
Sponsored by Dumonde Tech, the spa day in a bottle for your chain…
…I find myself paralyzed by indecision–or, more accurately, laziness.
So for inspiration I headed out upon my own Meh-roica bike:
And I’m pleased to report that in doing so I remembered something important. See, I purchased this bike back in April for a paltry sum, and after giving it a moderate amount of attention it boasts an elevated ride quality that is wildly out of proportion to its lowly price. Even so, few would give it so much as a second look, the main reason for this being that it is made out of that aluminum–or, as the British call it, aluminimum:
Of course it’s really aluminum alloy, and while the Artificially Intelligent Webernet tells me what it’s alloyed with is stuff like magnesium and zinc and silicon, what it’s really imbued with is something far more profound: pathos.
See, aluminum has less in common with other popular bicycle frame materials than it does with the band the Spin Doctors. In fact, they followed exactly the same trajectory. Both were huge in the ’90s, then their popularity dropped off precipitously, and today people hardly even think about them, even though they’re still very much around. As a washed-up bike blogger I also relate to aluminum personally, since we both went from being featured on the pages of cycling publications to residing deep in the chopped liver files.
For this reason I realized that I should give preferential treatment to aluminum bicycles for the purposes of this contest. And one company that is synanimous sinonamous made a crapload of aluminum bikes is Cannondale:
The above bicycle is one of two in a two-bike submission. Here is two of two:
The owner obtained both on the used market…for a total of Seven Hundred American Fun Tickets™.
Wow.
Yes, it is a buyer’s market for Meh-roica bikes in general and aluminum bikes in particular–unless they have a pedigree, such as spending a whole racing season sitting on top of a car, in which case the price can be a bit higher:
[From here]
And here’s another Cannondale:
This one has just a dash of JBARA, but the owner has in fact BARA, so this bike is no longer in regular service. But it was, from 1995 to 2020. That’s [counts on fingers and toes and then five of someone else’s toes] twenty-five years, or a quarter of a century, or 2.5% of a millennium. Not too bad for a bike once derided as a “Crack-‘n-fail,” and from the looks of it there’s easily another quarter-century left in it.
As for Cannondale today, like so many other bike companies they’re now just another name:
One of many swallowed up by the Crimson Permanent Assurance:
Their tenuous connection to Connecticut finally severed, they’re now basically just some people in random places around the globe having Zoom meetings about decals:
The restructuring will bring Cannondale’s global leadership, brand and marketing, product management, and other central functions together in Woudenberg, the Netherlands, where the company’s European headquarters is already located. Its research, development, and engineering operations will remain in Freiburg, Germany.
Sorry, they probably do more than that, but I’m a bike blogger, not a journalist.
Meanwhile, Trek wanted to be the one doing the swallowing, and recently CEO John Burke reflected on how they bought like nine million bike shops:
Here’s the interview:
RF: Do you have regrets on how you navigated the first few years after 2020? Perhaps overbuying into that demand, putting too much money into expanding retail spaces for a demand that wasn’t going to sustain itself?
JB: Yes.
Well, there’s some more stuff in there too, but that’s the gist of it.
I must say I don’t envy any bike shop owner, whether it’s a single proprietor or a big bike company like Trek:
Was the Trek employee following some sort of smarmy Burkian sales philosophy playbook that he devised after skimming 52 books a year and summoning bullshit artists he finds intriguing to his office? Probably. Still, I’ve got enough retail experience to read between the lines, and I took the Trek employee’s side as soon as I read this:
I’m not a biker, I’ve probably ridden a bike 10 times in the past 10 years
So I’m going to go ahead and assume he went in there feeling extremely defensive and insecure and he didn’t want to look like a schmuck in front of his wife so he argued with the salesman about pretty much everything and demanded things like different tires after doing four seconds of G**gling and reading the first paragraph of a “Bicycling” article before he hit the paywall.
Speaking of the cycling media, they should really work on their headlines:
I clicked on this immediately because I assumed the road raging driver actually broke out of prison and a maniac was on the loose, but it turns out that, while a maniac is indeed on the loose, he simply avoided going to prison in the first place:
When handing down the sentence, Sheriff Fergus Thomson told the defendant he had inflicted “significant injuries”, and explained that he was avoiding a custodial sentence “by the narrowest of margins”.
Instead Hedley received a two-year supervision order, and he will also be tagged and given a 12-month overnight home curfew, meaning he can’t leave his place of residence between 7pm and 7am for the next year.
I dunno, unless they took away his Internet, not being allowed to leave the comfort of your own home from 7pm to 7am sounds like a reward to me.