# Old bikes at new prices



## G3CWI (23 Sep 2018)

I was in the market for an MTB and noticed that a local shop had a 2012 model still in stock. Went in and had a look. Nice bike at £1900 but nevertheless an old model. Wondered if I could get further discount given its age and was offered £50. Needless to say I walked away.


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## screenman (23 Sep 2018)

G3CWI said:


> I was in the market for an MTB and noticed that a local shop had a 2012 model still in stock. Went in and had a look. Nice bike at £1900 but nevertheless an old model. Wondered if I could get further discount given its age and was offered £50. Needless to say I walked away.



Maybe they paid a bit more than that for it.


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## Bonefish Blues (23 Sep 2018)

screenman said:


> Maybe they paid a bit more than that for it.


...or are simply determined to follow the path to oblivion blazed by so many LBS in recent years


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## Slick (23 Sep 2018)

Doesn't really matter what they paid for it, it's only ever worth what someone is willing to pay for it and a 6 year old bike is never going to go up in value any time soon. 

I would have walked away too.


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## Bonefish Blues (23 Sep 2018)

Slick said:


> Doesn't really matter what they paid for it, it's only ever worth what someone is willing to pay for it and a 6 year old bike is never going to go up in value any time soon.
> 
> I would have walked away too.


And at that price point you don't get a walk-in muppet who might buy it without knowing it's old stock (and tech, given how quickly things have moved on), so it will continue to languish & depreciate.


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## Salar (23 Sep 2018)

I usually by used as I'm a bit retro.

However if I was after last couple of seasons models I would definitely check out Pauls Cycles.

A few years ago I bought a Kona from them, which was a two year old model. Saved £350 off current list price.


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## SkipdiverJohn (23 Sep 2018)

If you want a 2012 bike buy a used 2012 bike at depreciated secondhand prices. No-one in their right mind would pay full retail for a last years model of car, you'd be expecting a chunky discount. Same goes for any other product which is deliberately regularly updated by the manufacturer in order to devalue the previous model. Cars, bikes, smartphones etc, are all victims of planned obsolescence marketing strategies and should be valued accordingly even if still brand new in the box.


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## Bonefish Blues (23 Sep 2018)

SkipdiverJohn said:


> If you want a 2012 bike buy a used 2012 bike at depreciated secondhand prices. No-one in their right mind would pay full retail for a last years model of car, you'd be expecting a chunky discount. Same goes for any other product which is deliberately regularly updated by the manufacturer *in order to devalue the previous model.* Cars, bikes, smartphones etc, are all victims of planned obsolescence marketing strategies and should be valued accordingly even if still brand new in the box.


Isn't it more to encourage sales of "new and better", but it amounts to the same effect.


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## screenman (23 Sep 2018)

SkipdiverJohn said:


> If you want a 2012 bike buy a used 2012 bike at depreciated secondhand prices. No-one in their right mind would pay full retail for a last years model of car, you'd be expecting a chunky discount. Same goes for any other product which is deliberately regularly updated by the manufacturer in order to devalue the previous model. Cars, bikes, smartphones etc, are all victims of planned obsolescence marketing strategies and should be valued accordingly even if still brand new in the box.



There are millions of articles worth more now than when new. I have owned thousands of cars that would have been so if I had cared for them.


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## smokeysmoo (23 Sep 2018)

A friend of mine who has his own bike shop, (granted it's a small one man operation), doesn't bother stocking any new bikes anymore, (he can order them in though), mainly because there's not enough margin in them for a small high street store v's online retailers. He doesn't have the space to pile them high and discount them as much as online, and he couldn't afford the hit if he then had to heavily discount unsold models the following year just to shift them.
He makes his money, (it's hard work though), doing repairs and fixing BSO's supplied by other places. 

I used to fancy my own bike shop once upon a time, (and I wouldn't rule it out now but I'd need those 6 numbers to come up first), but seeing what my mates gone through in the last 10 years or so has put me right off the idea as a means of making a decent income TBH


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## Bonefish Blues (23 Sep 2018)

screenman said:


> There are millions of articles worth more now than when new. I have owned thousands of cars that would have been so if I had cared for them.


The trick is knowing which ones they are - and when to sell! That and being able to preserve the asset whilst it rises in price.


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## SkipdiverJohn (23 Sep 2018)

screenman said:


> There are millions of articles worth more now than when new. I have owned thousands of cars that would have been so if I had cared for them.



Very few objects appreciate in value unless only a tiny percentage of them still survive, they were a low-volume niche product to begin with, or they are the subject of speculative activity by wealthy individuals looking for a better return than on cash.
The vast majority of all the products produced in any industrialised country depreciate heavily in their first few years of existence, and then gradually flatline afterwards. 
Take old good quality steel bikes as an example. I just bought a slightly shabby 30-ish year old drop-bar Dawes with a 531 frame for £40. Adjusted for inflation, that would have been a £700 bike new in today's money, so I'm paying 6p in the pound sold-as-seen. It will probably end up costing close to £100 by the time I've finished tidying it up and am happy with it, which is 14p in the pound. It will have still lost over 85% of it's original value despite being every bit as useable as when new. Even a mint one isn't going to fetch much more than £200 on the used market. If you'd bought a load of British steel bikes 30 years ago purely as an investment, you'd have lost a lot of money, especially due to the opportunity cost of not being able to invest that money elsewhere.


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## Drago (23 Sep 2018)

What was the 2012 price? If it were £3500, then £1900 isn't a bad whack. If it was £1900, then they've little hope of shifting it. 

As a very rough guide, new bikes from the previous model year sell for about 40% less than the same model from the current year. I guess that figure decreases further slightly over time...until it's 40 years old and the value skyrockets due to the "vintage tax".


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## ozboz (23 Sep 2018)

I saved a packet on my carbon as it had been in the shop for 18 mths +, im not very business savvy, but im sure stock items devalue as time goes by ,


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## Slick (23 Sep 2018)

screenman said:


> There are millions of articles worth more now than when new. I have owned thousands of cars that would have been so if I had cared for them.


I've told you a million times about exaggerating.


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## screenman (23 Sep 2018)

Slick said:


> I've told you a million times about exaggerating.



I bought and sold 5,000 cars over a 14 year period.


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## screenman (23 Sep 2018)

Skipdiver, for some myself included it is not just about how much a person can save.


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## Drago (23 Sep 2018)

screenman said:


> I bought and sold 5,000 cars over a 14 year period.



A 14 year period? That was one helluva hot flush!


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## G3CWI (23 Sep 2018)

The bike is discounted over the new price but, in my opinion, not enough for a bike that's been in the shop for nearly seven year. In my negotiations I suggested a discount (unspecified) and fitting a dropper post. The offer of £50 off the marked price (only) was a bit insulting I felt. In the end I have bought something else. Okay, it's 900 g heavier but it's £850 cheaper!


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## Slick (23 Sep 2018)

G3CWI said:


> The bike is discounted over the new price but, in my opinion, not enough for a bike that's been in the shop for nearly seven year. In my negotiations I suggested a discount (unspecified) and fitting a dropper post. The offer of £50 off the marked price (only) was a bit insulting I felt. In the end I have bought something else. Okay, it's 900 g heavier but it's £850 cheaper!


As would most, enjoy the new bike.


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## SkipdiverJohn (23 Sep 2018)

screenman said:


> Skipdiver, for some myself included it is not just about how much a person can save.



It is for mere mortals who don't have bottomless pockets. If you buy everything new, especially using borrowed money, you don't get very much bang for your buck in terms of how many items or what quality of items, a certain level of income will afford you. On the other hand, if you hunt down the secondhand bargains, you can own several used items for the cost of one new one, and/or enjoy owning high quality products at no more cost than cheap inferior ones. 
What you need is a different mindset, where you reject the concept of running like a hamster on it's wheel, just to earn money to spend on products that are deliberately designed to quickly go out of fashion. I don't buy into the consumerist treadmill of constantly "upgrading" or replacing things based purely on age or level of technology employed. All the times the objects I own keep doing the job I bought them to do, I see no reason to replace them. There is very little new under the sun in most cases, and most so-called "improvements" in products are 90% marketing hype and maybe, if you are very lucky, 10% of tangible progress.


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## screenman (23 Sep 2018)

There you have it "certain level of income" What level of saving in the bank would you say somebody should have before they start buying new things, so that you can have the old one's.


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## roadrash (23 Sep 2018)

different folks/different strokes, what is right or wrong for one person may be the opposite for another , neither is right or wrong, just different.... what is wrong is someone telling another that buying new / old is wrong just because they themselves don't do it


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## Phaeton (23 Sep 2018)

I used to buy graphics cards in for the company I was working for, the latest model would come in, then get superseded by the next sometimes before our shipment even landed. In the end we started making smaller orders but flying them in rather than by boat, but even with that we would still sometimes have to sell them at a big percentage loss, otherwise the longer we kept them the more money we would lose. This was around 20 years ago when the top end card would be £350ish, but 2 months later worth only £100.


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## Drago (23 Sep 2018)

Give it long enough and someone from Retrobikes will spot it and buy it for good money.

Then they'll ride it for 5 years, give it a wipe, and sell is a NOS...


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## G3CWI (24 Sep 2018)

Drago said:


> Give it long enough



Given that things like tyres and seals deteriorate with time I think six years is easily long enough!


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