Fresh Goods Friday 675 – The Black, White & Read All Over Edition

Welcome one and all to the six hundred and seventy fifth installment of Fresh Goods Friday.

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By ben_haworth

Get the full story here:

Fresh Goods Friday 675 – The Black, White & Read All Over Edition

£200+ shoes?

Been like that for ages hasn’t it? Expensive shoes, I mean.

 

 

At least they £200+ ones have some gore-tex and stuff. I’m more amazed/appalled at the £180 trainers (and I know someone will pipe up and say they’re not trainers they’re technical riding shoes or some such guff, but in materials and construction they’re basically trainers).

And let’s not ignore eighteen quid for a two quid water bottle.

And let’s not ignore eighteen quid for a two quid water bottle.

Assumed that was a typo. £1.80.

one day hopefully, i will look at the Fresh Goods Friday thing, and it will be a budget edition………. where i can actually afford something on show.

TBF those glasses with interchangeable lenses seem vaguely sensible at £30.

Agreed with Ton , also Chinese made daps have a hell of a mark up ! Oh and the “ innovative “ feature on an £18 bottle ? I see right through that ! 🙄 

The same marketing mumbo jumbo that brought us hands free technology on Sketchers shoes , they are slip ons like we used to wear before we learned to tie laces 🙄

True but I read ST and frequent STW for shiny bits and odd stuff.

Do I need it? No

Is it overpriced? Yes / Sometimes / No

Do I want shiny stuff? Yes I’m a magpie in human form.

 

Pedals look great, I’d love a pair. However I’m running some 6 year old composites with 13 year old 510’s, cause I’m tight and they work (enough anyway for now)

GF has just taken delivery of some of those Shimano winter flats (paid £180).
She is normally womens size 7 in 5:10 and the blokes Shimano size 7 fits lengthwise.
Her report is they are a tad narrow (but not restrictive narrow) – we’ll see how they bed in.

That Lazer helmet has reminded me how few pink and/or purple full face lids there are out there. I just spent far too long tracking down a small helmet for the daughter. In the end we found a pink/blue Bluegrass lid that kept her happy.

I need ebike specfic bars! I can’t believe I was fobbed off with normal bars (what I changed for bargain carbon ones and now want EBIKE specific ones!) Life is unfair. £150! Crimmins!

MBR used to measure tyres with a Shore durometer. it would be interesting to know the rating for the soles of flat shoes.

She is normally womens size 7 in 5:10 and the blokes Shimano size 7

interesting. what model of 5:10 is she comparing them to?

@LAT Womens Freeriders
I double checked and she said she was using womens size 7 freeriders for ever but had to size up to womens 7.5 freeriders for last pair.

One day on FGF I will actually see something I want🙃

One day on FGF I will read it and not wonder why everything in mtbing is so driven by marketing guff and so stupidly expensive.

Or maybe I will just stop reading it…. 

200 quid pedals???

Those GF8 shoes look like a 19th century cure for something. Ugly.  And the water bottle……really, £18.00?  Nah, pass.

Where are the gf8s available for 180?

I “need” some of those for my commute and winter riding.

Is that the correct image for the bar, as printed on it are the words, “Oneup Components Alu Bar” suggesting it’s not Carbon?

£200 pedals and they run so close to the cranks you can only use 80% of them

Please can we stop the constant how much. Yes there expensive just don’t buy them then.it gets tedius week in week out .

Personally I’ll happily dump 200 notes on shoes because I can and pedals .

It’s an expensive sport  if you want it to be equally it doesn’t have to be just quit the whinging

Those GF8 shoes look like a 19th century cure for something. Ugly

There are endless skate shoe style flat pedal shoes out there for you. If the GF8 works well as a filthy conditions shoe I will get my wallet out for a pair.

It’s an expensive sport  if you want it to be equally it doesn’t have to be just quit the whinging

But it needn’t be. Selling water bottles for £18 is taking the piss. The issue is that people are happy to be ripped off.

People need to stand up to it! The whole pricing structure is broken.

Chill Harry, they’ll be discounted on CRC in no time……

Personally I’ll happily dump 200 notes on shoes because I can and pedals .

Humblebrag much?

Seriously, we are being ripped off!

How does a bike tyre cost almost as much as a car tyre? The technology, materials and energy consumption in vehicle tyres surpasses those in bike tyres. The reason is that the vehicle market wouldn’t stand it.

I work in the tyre production industry BTW.

We are being taken for mugs.

I work in the tyre production industry BTW.

Have a word sayong theres a killing to be made by making cheap but top quality tyres.

As an aside, there is at least one person up there moaning about the cost of the items whose last bike was a Titanium Fargo with a Rohloff! 😉

Nice to see some gluten free shoes at last.

TBH if they really do the job, £220 RRP for a proper bike shoe with goretex is something I might buy, if I could count on them working for me. But shimano shoes I’ve had in the past have been great but not lasted very well, and riding shoes are a matter of taste so you might just not like the feel or the grip level or they might have hotspots or dig in or something and so £220 seems insane with that many ifs that you can only answer by buying em and gettign them dirty. The Five Ten goretex ones turned out not great for me, worse than some non-bike shoes I use for biking- in fact worse even than some non-bike Five Tens. So it’s a no for me

I’m pretty sure this is at least the 10th year in a row of shimano redesigning their flat pedal soles, is “just copy a five ten freerider” really so hard?

You can still get a budget bike tyre for less than £20 and high quality car tyres will cost more than 10 times that. Comparing a top end mountain bike tyre with a budget car tyre is equally misleading.

As an aside, there is at least one person up there moaning about the cost of the items whose last bike was a Titanium Fargo with a Rohloff! 😉

haha, but now that bloke is a poor pensioner…………… ;o)

If anyone wants to see pedals with axle dims / centre width – approx. here with axles added to the WT template (odd they don’t include this to start with). The cage is of the pedal design that is close to the crank which makes them less wide than they could be and think is you wide more midfoot is terrible.

In any case after previously wasting money on expensive premium pedals in the past, I just buy these:

https://www.ht-components.com/product/productDetail/13

Big, durable, grippy and reasonably priced

TBH if they really do the job, £220 RRP for a proper bike shoe with goretex is something I might buy, if I could count on them working for me

Me too, and I made the initial comment about the shoe prices. It’s not those ones that are taking the piss though, it’s the ones that are, basically, a pair of skate pumps but are £180.

People need to stand up to it! The whole pricing structure is broken

Especially when magazines/websites like this that purports to offer balanced reviews of the stuff, so you’d hope would be a fairly impartial arbiter of quality, performance, value etc, just swallows it whole.

Eighteen quid for that bottle is mental. Now, Benji might really like the design and be prepared to pay that, fair enough, but it would be a fairly obvious thing to say “I love it so bought one, but yeah, eighteen quid is a bit mental”.

Well even if my dad was a mediocre football manager I wouldn’t drop £200 on pedals or shoes, and plenty here can easily afford it but don’t feel the need to say so, it’s about seeing the value. it’s overpriced, end of. It has a knock on effect, they get away with it cos there’s always mugs willing to pay it.
For example if people stopped buying trickstuff brakes they wouldn’t go under they’d just charge £600 instead of a grand, probably shift more and expand production too.

Personally I’ll happily dump 200 notes on shoes because I can and pedals

Just the kinda mug they love. I’ve got the money so I’ll spend it on shit. Mug.

I guess put it another way, if I was still racing, and back up kinlochleven in the snow racing down what are basically streams of icemelt, and there was a little stall in town selling goretex flat pedal hi-top shoes for £220 I would not hesitate 🙂

Definitely agree about the other ones that are basically just shoes. I mean, the GF7 seems similar to but simpler than the GE7 but they’re the same price? Meanwhile RRP aside, you can pretty much always get freeriders for £60-£70, or the slightly techier DLX version for £80, or the Pro version for £90 if you like a stiffer less feeley sole, and they seem like the exact competitors except also the well-proven benchmark that these ones seem to be yet another attempt to match.

Likewise there used to be a semi-sensible market for **** expensive pedals back when cheap pedals were crap or heavy or bulky, but now I can think of a half a dozen pedals at £45 or less that are probably just as good as those. My Thinkriders are bloody awesome and they cost me £18.

Also, just noticed the thread name- my twitter handle is adeadpenguin, cos I used to ride a cotic hemlock that was black and white and red all over, so I approve

shimano shoes looking like they might actually be wide enough for my wide feet! hopefully?

anyone else now have proper wide feet from wearing barefoot shoes?

To be fair, we rarely bring the price of products into our assessment of them in reviews. One person’s view of value is going to be different to another’s. We try to review products based on their intended use and how well they rate on that. If it’s an expensive way of going about it, we’ll mention it, but won’t necessarily slam something because it’s expensive.

It’s up to the buyer to decide if they want to spend that money on that product to make them that much happier/better. We could spend ages looking for the AliExpress versions of every product we’re sent, but that’s for someone else to do. We still work in the bike industry biosphere, where people add a margin for their efforts for importing/distributing and retailing a product and we’ll present things as such. The STW-appropriate example would be watches, where a £5 Casio will tell better time than a £5000 (£10K now, surely?) Rolex.

Sometimes you’re not just paying for the function, you’re paying for the R&D, the marketing, the sponsored riders, the flagship store and the nice keyring you get in the box. Other times, you’re just paying for the minimum fuss, don’t even get a box and can wear them right now and go out riding. You’re only being ripped off if you buy something that you think is going to be more awesome, life-fulfilling than it actually is. I’ve got some 10 year old Camelbak Podium bottles that are still going strong. They cost £16 a go. If you don’t lose it, that’s £1.60 a year and dropping. 

It’s up to the buyer to decide if they want to spend that money on that product to make them that much happier/better.

The problem with this argument is that it’s publications like this that, largely, set buyer expectations. So, by not bringing price into a review, you’re effectively saying that £18 quid for a water bottle or £180 for a pair of pumps is reasonable. So that becomes the received wisdom in the market, and that’s what stuff costs.

Whereas you could be saying “yeah, they’re good, but the price is nuts”.

I remember years ago you reviewed a Rapha jacket and basically said “you’re taking the piss with your pricing”. There’s very little of that now.

[And I know FGF isn’t about reviewing stuff, it’s just saying what you’ve been sent, but even there there’s scope]

There are so many flat pedals on the market now… those Wolf Tooth ones look nice but you are so spoilt for choice I’m not sure why I’d chose them over Hope, Gusset, Superstar, etc.  I did just buy some Pinnd flats because they use all bearings rather than bushes so I thought I’d see if they last longer before developing play…