Good morning,
The answer is clear to me.
- When you don't use it because you are scared of the cost of an accident or wear and tear.
- When something more important to you, your family or friends is put off to buy or maintain the bike.
I feel that over the last 40 odd years or so we have become used to super cheap products based on imports where the lifestyle of those people making those products is significantly worse than ours, so a £3k bike seems super expensive.
If you inflation adjust a 531 Team Raleigh with Campag Super Record from the 1970/1980s they come out at around £3k in today's money.
They had a pretty basic steel frames, despite all of the marketing to suggest something to the contrary, and pretty basic aluminium alloy and steel parts. So a bike with CF frame and wheels and electronic shifting could be expected to cost a bit more that this.
Yet this sort of bike back then wouldn't have been considered way over the top for most club riders.
I was gutted to find out that the original 753 team bikes were actually made on a production line, okay it was a small line, one guy would build the bottom bracket area and another guy do different joins and possibly a third guy some more. As a 753 frame was very difficult to bend into shape when complete, sorry cold set, each joint needed to be fully cooled down before the next one was made to avoid tension from shrinkage. What this did mean was that the frames had a quite short build time as each person was up to speed on his bit of the batch.
For me the only time that it would be any business of anyone else would be if the purchaser has dramatically misunderstood what he thinks that he is buying compared with what he actually is buying. Has weighs 300lbs, has bought a £10k team bike and wants to mount a seat post rack to carry some shopping on a Saturday, Specialized have tended to have something like a 240lbs weight limit so he would be in big trouble
Bye
Ian