Yes, it’s true. Urban Outfitters – the harbinger of cringe inducing college-kid fashion and the store best known for giving the populace the Palestinian scarf en masse to America – is finally catching up with its self image and is now selling fixed gear bikes.
The bike I designed, which came in at only $450. Not bad, eh?
News like this might set Brooklyn ablaze, indeed, as it seems that Everybody Who Has Ever Ridden A Bike And Liked Music seems to be against it. It’s actually a surprisingly good deal: I designed my own bike and the total was only $450 with shipping, which when considering that $450 is how much some pay for the frame alone, is actual a pretty good deal.
I don’t mean to say that I know a lot about bikes, but I do know that cries of “sell out” and “hey those bikes were only supposed to be for pretentious people” are falling on mostly deaf ears. What’s the point about fixed gear bikes becoming so “de rigeour” anyway? It’s a bike. You ride it places. It’s healthy. So why are hipster kids getting so butt hurt about it?
The answer lies not in the bikes themselves but in the price. Where many people in Brooklyn and other gentrified areas have “had to” spend increasingly larger and larger amounts on customizable parts for their bikes over the last seven or eight years (in which the fixed gear bike has risen to alarming popularity). Clearly we’ve all been there. To the, “Oh man, the thing I liked has gotten popular all of a sudden,” canard, but bikes? Seriously? That’s like everyone in LA getting upset over the rest of the country driving cars.
Get yours here at Urban for $450. It’s a pretty decent deal. No word yet on as to how these bikes hold up, but regardless, its still a great buy for a great item.
$450 for a single speed bike, why !!! for that amount of money get a good multi-speed bike.
What the crap. $450 for a single-gear, no coast, no frills, very poorly-equipped bike? Go to Wal-Mart or Meijer or any other big-box store and get a $150 bike. Certainly entry-level, but capable, not crippled.
I like the hybrid road/cruisers by shwinn…. costco has ‘em for $400 or so.
I can’t wait until HUffy White Heats come back in style. Those are great bikes. They even come with hand gaurds to protect your knuckles when you riding in the bush!
too much $$$ for what you get. plus, the kids that get fixies w/o breaks, but don’t know how to ride them? they deserve to get him – and they do.
survival of the fittest.
yakman and Jack: more gears isn’t what people who ride fixies want. you don’t understand what this article is about. fixed gear is a style of riding and also a culture.
How is a mechanical shortcoming a culture? I could only drive a car with no brakes and hand-powered wipers, or use plates for cereal, or web browse on a text-only browser. However, I wouldn’t pay several times more to do any of those, and it would hardly be a “culture,” and if it were, none of them would be any less backward to do.
the upper class men will always haze the new comers…
the urban hipsters are very possessive over their style
and well
seeing fashion purchased in a store puts a bad taste in my mouth
what scares me…
well… flat pedals on a fixed gear is one problem
and
having a bicycle assembled by a non-mechanic is another
purchasing a bicycle from a bicycle shop gets a bike assembled and adjusted by an actual mechanic
not the employee who got tired of stocking shelves and folding shirts
then… a bicycle shop also gives free service for a year after purchase
that certainly has to count for something
I am sure it is a fine bike for not much money
there are those that link their coolness to the camera that do not feel so good about the cameras being sold at Urban Outfitters
http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/catalog/category.jsp?popId=APARTMENT&navAction=poppushpush&isSortBy=true&navCount=3&pushId=APARTMENT_MEDIA&id=A_MEDIA_CAMERAS
me…
I am too old to have a dog in this fight
I’m pissed that Wall-Mart sells paint and paintbrushes! They were so much cooler before!!!
More Bikes Less Cars.
The problem with Urban outfitters selling these bikes is that they are OVERcharging for them. Do a little research and you’ll find that the bikes come from republic bikes, a company that uses some of the cheapest materials in the construction of their frames. Essentially, the bikes that they sell are crappy, add that to the fact that most people who would be dumb enough to buy a bike from Urban Outfitters is probably a hipster (a group that many fixed gear riders are trying to desperately trying to differentiate themselves from), and you’d see why there’s a problem.
To be honest you can actually get a good fixed gear bike for around the same price, at a much better quality, from sites like bikedirect. It’s not the price that people are pissed about, it’s the fact that there is such a low quality product that’s being pased off as something it’s not.
And as for the walmart box store bikes, there’s a reason they cost next to nothing compared to these bikes. It’s because they are a POS Chinese copy that uses totally subpar materials and methods in it’s construction, not to mention that they are assembled under fairly lax standards.
Great example of this is when I first started college I was using a walmart bike (paid maybe $70) that I had gotten late in high school, after putting maybe 400 miles on it the crank arm actually sheared off, making it unusable. As that was all I knew at the time, I just picked up another walmart bike for $80 and it lasted about just as long when everything on it just about fell apart. After that I got smart and picked up a trek mountain bike for $450, which I’ve put 1000miles on, and is still in almost mint condition. I also recently picked up a fixed gear by IRO bikes, a reputable bike seller based in PA, I paid about $1000 for the bike and wheelset, and after putting close to 2000 miles on it in the period of about 6 months, I can definitely say it rides like it does the day I got it in the mail and assembled it, and can see it continuing to ride fine for many more 1000s of miles. So it comes down to this, put down a hundred or so for some box-store bike that’ll break down every few months, or shell out a little more dough, and get a bike that’ll last for years with routine maintenance. Buy nice or buy twice.
$450 for a bike? That’s pretty expensive, actually. I’d rather just get a bike from a swapmeet for cheap, restore it, and convert it into a fixie.
450 for a bike that sells for 200-350 elsewhere and (dare i say) is not worth either. my opinion is if hipsters are willing to pay that much for a crappy bike it raises the amount that I can get for a retro-mod (rebuilt vintage bike) so I really care less. I observe the lack of pedal clips-cages so i do also agree with the suicide remark. peace
Flat pedals on a fixed gear are actually a safety mechanism for newer riders. Being able to ditch your bike with a minimum of entanglement seems like a good design feature, especially if a bunch of the people riding these don’t have much fixed gear mileage under their belts.
What doesn’t make sense though is buying a $450 candy bar of a bike as one’s introduction to fixed gear riding. I ride a beat up, scrambled together, piece of shit fixed gear because I know that I will crash it while I’m learning how to better avoid crashing it.
Are these bikes assembled and adjusted by trained mechanics or by cashiers? Also, Gary Fisher sells a “Bike Shop grade” fixie called the Gritty City for $300.