May I ask, and I'm not trying to be clever with this question, do you hold the same views on a wide range of multinational companies or brands who do exactly the same for an enormous range of widely varying products?
Western consumers tend to demand low prices and buy from the cheapest possible source for virtually everything. We know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Quite possibly if consumers were prepared to pay more realistic prices we would have many exciting and profitable manufacturers in Europe and the UK?
I feel criticism of the cycling industry for following the same path is unfair, especially when so many cyclists look for the lowest possible prices online rather than supporting an LBS?
Please understand I'm only highlighting your post because it raises the question in my mind. Don't see this as a criticism of your view.
Yes, really it's a critique of modern disposible capitalist consumption as a whole; a model that (like most others) the bike industry has sadly followed.
Unlike most other consumers it seems, I like to carefully select what I buy on the grounds of quality and longevity, look after stuff and keep it for a long time. Granted I'd rather pay less than more, but under my favoured model this is less of an issue if you only buy something once every ten years rather than every ten minutes.
Modern consumption has become a disgusting, wasteful, unsustainable parody of itself and is something I wish to remove myself from as much as possible. I'm the anthesis of what modern producers want - critical of thought, suspicious / dismissive of marketing, in it for the long haul rather than short-term fads.
The bike industry is very mature, there's not much new under the sun and a decent steel bike will go on forever if looked after.. so the marketing muppets are always looking for new ways to try and separate us from our money - more gears, lighter bikes, electronics in places they IMO have no right to be. Much (if granted not all) of this has very little effect on rider enjoyment and often brings with it huge drawbacks for "benefits" that often amount to little more than irrelevant constructs from some marketing department.
Once you've been round the block you see it everywhere - every new bike is "x percent stiffer", "y amount lighter"; and while these things are arguably better (at least in isolation, and assuming the claims are vaid), a lot of the time trends seem to be arbitrary goals that appear to be different just for the sake of it. A good example is bottom bracket standards - threaded and standardised for decades; then everyone goes to theor own of a multitude of press-fit configurations (probably because on paper they're cheaper to produce) loads buy bikes that are shite as a result and manufacturers quietly go back to threaded again.
This is just what the government are doing with cars - ostensibly in the name of the environment, but really it's just a cynical ploy to keep people buying ever-more-expensive, shorter-of-life vehicles. First there was the scrappage scheme because "old=polluting and bad" (trade in your solid old motor for some new crap that'll probably be dead before the old one would have been to drive up new car sales, both immediately and in future). Next there was the diesel thing - tax benefits because "fuel economy and low CO2 are good"; everyone bins their petrol cars and rushes out to buy diesel, it takes a massive market share then a few years later it's vilified on the grounds of NOx and particulate emissions - all stuff that was known about when it was first pushed. Now finally there's the drive towards electric; stuff which is enormously expensive (so largely funded by debt) to the point of being out of reach of many.. the plan no doubt being to get most of the petrol cars off the road with increasingly draconian taxation. Everyone knows electric isn't sustainable however (limitations on battery tech, finite availability of resources, lack of infrastructure support) so I think this one will die on its arse before the government really want it to..
Look at the differing attitude towards goods between our current society and that of our grandparents (and bikes are a good example of this) - to paraphrase your comment, nobody now values goods according to their intrinsic value; only their perceived financial worth.
Despite being perfectly serviceable, so much stuff is binned simply because the marketing scumbags have persuaded unquestioning consumers that it's obsolete and to replace it with the next best thing - which is often anything but.. while there's often little financial penalty because we've been exploiting emerging labour markets for decades.
Same thing with used cars - I recall when the Eastern European economic migrants started coming over here a few decades ago, they'd buy all manner of luxury cars and ship them back home as they were worth double there; despite our strong currency.. why? Because depreciation over here was enormous as everyone was buying brand new every ten minutes on finance. It's just another hallmark of our unsustainable, debt-led, consumption-driven economy.. although now with rates going up and the magic money tree no longer being mercillessly shaken that should all change; and rightly so.
As it happens the only new bike I've bought in recent years was tested at an LBS but bought online. I was prepared to pay the extra for not being that knobhead who wastes a shop's time only to buy cheaper elsewhere, however the shop turned out to be staffed by knobbers so after an unpleasant initial experience I went elsewhere.. and it was still a bricks and mortar shop, just not local to me.
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