Harng Goh wrote:
> Brendo wrote:
>
> > Just seen Bleve's thoughts on shitters, and what is the deal with
> > Giant? Are they **** bikes in general, or is it just personal
> > opinion? The are like arseholes around here, every LBS has them.
> >
> > brendo
>
> My take on it:
>
> Giants are sort of like Toyota Camrys. They're value for money and
> they're everywhere. Giant have their high-end and their low-end
> models,same as most other brands. I don't have personal experience with
> Giant, but I don't believe they could make a *bad* bike considering
> they sell that many units.
Flawed logic (not that this means Giant don't make good bikes though
.... just that your logic is broken). Eg: Huffy sell more bikes than
any other brand in the western world, but they do not make any "good"
bikes. All the Huffy's are shitters.
FWIW, Giant, in terms of market, are where Shogun were maybe 10-15
years ago. Too many distributors, flooded market, everyone has to sell
them on price alone (you all shop for the cheapest deal you can get on
an OCR3, or whatever model it is ... I dunno ... the cheapy Giant
roady).
As such, any LBS that sells Giant, will get burnt regularly by the
wholesaler or the bigger LBS's with containers of the things to dump at
end of season (remember the elcheapo prices on the Giant roadies from
TFM etc in June/July? Watch this space, it'll happen again next year,
the smaller LBS's with stock will have to match the prices or get no
sales - ouch).
It's kinda the nature of the beast, Giant churn out a lot of reasonable
roadies, reasonably cheap, but their wholesaler's practice burns
smaller LBS's (and the bigger ones too ... very few people buy Giants
on LBS service, they buy on price alone, thus killing the LBS's
margins). Inexa, Learsport, Bauer etc all do the "build it bloody cheap
in Taiwan, forget the frame & forks, just whack on random bits of a
high end groupset and call it "ultegra-equipped" trick too, and the low
end market for roadies is very cutthroat at the moment.
So, sooner or later, the LBS's get sick of getting burnt, and shy away
from them (happened with pac-dunlop's brands, happened with Shogun
etc).
Quality-wise, Giant's high end stuff is slowly becoming half decent,
their forks were notoriously flexy up until a few years ago (the best
upgrade for a Giant roady of more than 3 years age is a new fork,
you'll notice this ....). They're desperate for t-mobile to actually
win something significant, and their advertising campaigns are ... heh
.... anyway ... "Giant, cheap Ultegra!, who cares about the frame?".
Their low end roadies are ok, some of their component choices are
questionable, but they're catering to gumbies with them, and they build
very much to a price. For what it's worth, we (the LBS I work at, who
is not a Giant dealer, but we do get to repair and maintain a lot of
them, so I get to ride them regularly, and fit people to them) are
always happy for people to testride anything, (even a Giant!), and then
come and see us, and testride a cheap Trek (1000-1400) or Cannondale
(Synapse etc) to compare how they feel. We sell our fair share of Treks
& Cannondales in this way.
> The name matters to some. You could go out and buy a TCR Advanced 0. It
> would be like buying a Lexus GS430 - it's still just a Toyota.
I don't think it's name so much. The 'name' buyers are still stuck on
"Italian good, everything else bad", despite the fact that most
"Italian" bikes these days come out of the Giant factory. I think it's
the design and componentry of the bikes. Because Giant has no real
pedigree as such they're resorting to gimicks (the integrated seatpost
etc), and that's possibly a bad thing for them to do. If they
concentrated on building a really good bike, rather than a
gimick-stricken bike, they'd do better at the high end of the scale,
IMO.
What Giant *do* do very well is kids bikes and hybrids and that sort of
thing. They really know that market and they make good examples of
these bikes, at prices that sell well. Trek, by comparison, makes kids
bikes which are very good, but probably too good (thus, too expensive)
for kids. Mum & Dad won't spend $300 on a bike for little johnny that
he'll grow out of in 18 months. Giant, Apollo etc are quite strong in
this part of the market, so that makes them look bad to the 'elite
roady' buyers. Colnago doesn't make a hybrid! (Colnago doesn't make
Colnago, Giant does .... heh ... wankers
).