Brompton prices

[TheDoctor]

And maybe there was a decrease in price in Germany. I don't think there was in the UK. Either way, it's a long time ago and I think we're at risk of violently agreeing with each other. Bromptons are great, and maybe I got a really good deal by blind luck. It's the one bike in my fleet I'd never, ever sell.

 

[berlinonaut]

And maybe there was a decrease in price in Germany. I don't think there was in the UK.

That's absolutely possible as prices did not necessarily directly reflect each other, the German prices were always influenced by the exchange rate, the surcharge of the importer and the assumptions how the the exchange rate will develop over the next year, so always recognizably higher than in the UK but to different extends.

Either way, it's a long time ago.

I found a well hidden pdf in my archive in the meantime with UK list prices valid from January 2009. This is the relevant section:

A M6R with Dynamo Lights was not available as a key-model in 2009 in the UK but the price for a bespoke one was identical: GBP 765 in standard color (which was the choice between black or red in 2009).

 

[Kell]

It does seem somewhat dramatic.

Mine - which was not superseded for a couple of years - was £1080 in August 2015.

Using the inflation figures for the UK over the last few years, it should now cost £1174 for an H6L, but the Brompton site shows them as £1390 (and not in stock).

This spread sheet was actually me putting it together to justify what my new salary should be if it matched inflation rates, but by amending the figure in the green box, it can be repurposed for this.

The figure to look at is the £94.32 - so that's how much increase there should have been, whereas it's been £310.

 

[Kell]

I think a lot are bought on C2W schemes, so not with real money.

I think there's some truth in that. When I got mine, the maximum limit for a voucher was £1,000. Shops were not supposed to allow you to spend more than that - even if you paid the rest in cash, but in practice most did - within reason. My bike cost £1080, and the shop took an £80 deposit upfront in cash and I paid the remainder with the voucher when I got it.

 

[berlinonaut]

It does seem somewhat dramatic.

Mine - which was not superseded for a couple of years - was £1080 in August 2015.

Using the inflation figures for the UK over the last few years, it should now cost £1174 for an H6L, but the Brompton site shows them as £1390 (and not in stock).

This spread sheet was actually me putting it together to justify what my new salary should be if it matched inflation rates, but by amending the figure in the green box, it can be repurposed for this.

The figure to look at is the £94.32 - so that's how much increase there should have been, whereas it's been £310.

View attachment 608946

It seems you are to a degree comparing apples to oranges.
1. You have been leaving out the inflation for 2021. According to gov.uk it accumulates to 1,8% from January to July 2021. Today we are in September, so two months missing. Next data is due the day after tomorrow on Sept. 14th.
2. H6L at £1390 in Brompton's online shop inludes battery lightening as well as a Brooks Cambium C17 as upgrades - both probably missing in 2015. The actual battery lights are £55 for the front light and £19 for the rear light. The Cambium is around £100, depending from the model. An upgrade would possibly be a tad cheaper. So you'd possibly have aggregatedly to substract around £150 from the £1390 to compare apples with apples, possibly even a tad more.

So your 2021 price would change from £1390 to about £1240 - a bit of a difference. If you include the inflation for 2021 to your calculated 1174 you end up at £1.195,132, with two months of inflation still missing. Assumed that you base price of £1080 in 2015 was the list price and not a discounted one. Then you should consider that a 2021 Brompton includes a carrier block as a standard, a £15 value which the 2015 one lacked. So you better substract it. Now the premium over the calculated inflation has already shrunk from £216 to just £30, now that we are comparing apples to apples.

Then it is worth to reflect what the inflation number ist. It is an average. An average, typically built from the development of prices for a fixed set of goods and services that include things like bread, milk, cinema tickets, a typical phone contract, petrol prices, bus tickets etc.. It probably does not include folding bikes and those prices do not all develop equally - some rise more than others while others may not rise at all. There is a spread and the inflation rate is an average, nothing more. If the price development of a certain product is different from that average this is neither unusual nor a problem because other goods and services will compensate for that. Especially if the total difference is not that huge.
Imagine if you considered buying a house - what would you say when looking at the development of prices?

Last bit: In a capitalistic system prices depend from demand. Companies charge the highest price they can to increase profits, regulated by demand and competition. That is the basic and intended mechanism of capitalistic markets. Obviously the demand for Bromptons has skyrocketed since the start of Corona. They are at the absolute limit of their production capacity. Prices or components have gone up as well. Competition is not that relevant atm as for one most are in a different market segment and secondly they struggle to serve demand as well. What would you do? Possibly increase prices a little more than usual...

While it is fair do dislike price increases and to compare prices one should do that on a realistic basis and not use poisoned data - else you may come to wrong conclusions...

 

[Kell]

Should have known you'd take issue.

Like virtually all my 'calculations' these are done with a very broad brush...

No I didn't include the 2021 inflation rise, because my initial chart didn't include it. Yes I only used the 'one off' annual figure rather than trying to calculate it on a monthly or daily basis. And no I wasn't too worried about missing two months off. I forgot to mention in my post that the price for the latest model included the lighting and I hadn't appreciated it was quite so expensive, so lets deduct that.

So £1080 in August 2015 to £1390 in August 2021. Versus a predicted (via annual inflation) price of £1,195 with your additional input.

Minus £74 for the lights is £1,316.

Let's not subtract the carrier block as mine has one and was included in my final £1080 price. And no, that wasn't a discounted price for an end of line bike. I don't think I paid for any additional extras as I'm sure the extended seatpost and my colourway were no-cost options too.

ETA: I might have paid extra for the M+ tyres though, as well as the EZ wheels - how much of a difference did they make?

I don't think it's fair to subtract as much as you did for the C17 seat. That retails at £100, but the Brompton standard saddle retails at £37.50. So lets only subtract a further £62.50 to get to a figure of £1253.5.

So that seems about right - except that online, the lowest price I've seen for an H6L without the lights or C17 seat is £1275. Or about £80 over and above what you might otherwise have expected.

The other thing to consider, however, is that if Brompton are ONLY giving you the option to purchase one at £1,390, it's irrelevant if it includes the lights and upgraded seat or not. If they're not optional, then that's now standard spec. Which means the price of the bike has gone up by that amount and they're including a better spec. It's like saying it's not fair comparing the pre- and post-2017 bikes as the spec changed. It's not that I'm not comparing apples with apples, it's that apples are now oranges, and they're more expensive.

Pointless including houses in your counter argument as prices for exactly the same design of house on exactly the same street can vary massively due to multiple factors. Postcode, proximity to amenities/problems, view...

Watching a property programme several years ago, the houses on one side of the street were 50% more expensive than their counterparts on the other side.

Why? Because one side had a view of the Thames from their garden.

The opposite was true when watching a programme focussing on houses in West London where at one end of the street, houses were 'worth' several millions less than those at the other end because they were much nearer a dodgy block of council flats.

Now I never said that inflation should be used an an absolute measure, or that that I had an issue with Brompton charging whatever they like, but rather than being £30 more expensive when apples are compared to apples, it's £80. Or virtually double what you might have expected if inflation applied to everything equally.

All that said - the price quoted on the Brompton website is for a bike that's out of stock. Try and find one for sale at that price and I think you'd struggle.

Here's an M6L same spec, for £1400:

(The pics shows standard seat, but description says Cambian C17 and battery lighting)



Here's an M6L with no additional kit for £1379

Here's a standard H6L for 1300

 

[rogerzilla]

Prices crept up quickly until they reached the old Cyclescheme limit of £1000 - Brompton must have done very well out of Cyclescheme. It is no coincidence at all that an M3L cost exactly £1000 just before the change: https://brilliantbikes.co.uk/old-model-brompton-bikes/2983-brompton-m3l-lagoon-blue.html

Then, in 2019, the limit was removed, and prices have been climbing ever since.

 

[berlinonaut]

Prices crept up quickly until they reached the old Cyclescheme limit of £1000 - Brompton must have done very well out of Cyclescheme. It is no coincidence at all that an M3L cost exactly £1000 just before the change: https://brilliantbikes.co.uk/old-model-brompton-bikes/2983-brompton-m3l-lagoon-blue.html

Then, in 2019, the limit was removed, and prices have been climbing ever since.

I think we had this in another thread and the observation seems correct to me. Brompton would have been stupid to put themselves out of C2W, it would have costed them massive sales. Interestingly enough in Germany the M3L crossed that border way earlier. Also interesting is the jump in price for 2021, especially when thinking about the fact that since 2021 Brompton distribute themselves to German dealers and until late 2020 there was an importer (the same Company since the late 80ies when the father started to bring Brompton to Germany. His son took over a while ago and has coninued to built the Brompton brand massively ever since and is massively respected in the German Brompton community). So one middleman less but massive increase in price. Here's how German prices developed from 1999 until 2021:

The increase in prices may to a degree reflect the effects of Brexit - since 2021 imports from the UK underly customs which was not the case while the UK was part of the EU.

 

[rogerzilla]

Is there a similar cycle to work scheme in Germany? The savings these days aren't huge unless you keep the bike for (I think) 4 years, but it's a way to get credit without it technically being credit - you are hiring the bike from your employer, with an option to purchase.

Before final Cyclescheme purchase values were made more realistic, some people were buying a Brompton every year and selling it on at a profit.

 

[berlinonaut]

Is there a similar cycle to work scheme in Germany?

Yes, for a couple of years already but by far nor as long as in the UK. The ruleset is a bit different and seriously calculate savings is a bit difficult as German tax law is overly complex. Basically the scheme runs for 3 years and the companies promise a saving of 30%. Realistically it is rather 15-25% in most cases (a bit hard to calculate as a mandatory insurance is included with the scheme and the scheme is based on list prices plus dealers typically o charge list prices when selling via the scheme while you may pay a lower price if you buy cash or off season) and the saving depends from your taxable income (higher is better) and the price of the bike (again higher is better). At the end of the 3 year period you can buy the bike for close to 20% of the former list price.
Basically the tax rules are relatively similar to company cars though the way it is organized differs and the idea behind company cars is not to buy at the end of the leasing period whereas this is the intention behind the bike scheme because else it makes no sense fincandially. There are a handful of companies that organize leasing/buying via the scheme and act as the financial middleman between dealer, employer and employee, i.e. https://www.jobrad.org/ or https://www.businessbike.de/ (there are more).

There is no legal upper limit to the scheme but the employer can set one. Most set it at 10k€ per bike, some below that, very few beyond. You can have more than one bike via the scheme at the same time. Only in recent years it has become very popular, my employer joined in 2014 or 2015 and was a very early bird.