"Entry-level." I hate that term! Before Bicycling magazine foolishly shut down its forum and dumped tons of great posts from a few super knowledgeable members, new people often came in asking for advice on what to buy for $xxx (some ridiculously low price), saying, "I don't want to spend much until I find out if I'm really going to like cycling and stick with it." Then they'd ignore our advice and go buy something cheap, usually from a department store, something that was sluggish, didn't handle well, parts didn't work well, and it was hard to maintain.
What usually happens then is that they get discouraged, and two years later when the bike is hanging in their garage with two flat tires and a thick layer of dust and you ask, "Hey, how's the cycling going?", they usually answer, "Oh, I guess cycling just wasn't for me," not realizing that almost anyone would conclude the same thing if they start with such junk. At the time (probably around 2012), the bottom of the line of real road bikes from most major manufacturers (Trek, Specialized, Giant, BMC, etc.), sold in bike shops, cost about $700 IIRC; and since the competition there was pretty stiff, you'd get approximately the same thing from all of them, meaning one was not not really any better than another, as long as you bought from one of the major manufacturers of real road bikes, not imitation junk.
We also strongly recommended against buying online, since the newbie needs the support of a real bike shop for proper assembly, fit, maintenance, and other things, and online sellers like Bikes Direct had tons of bad reviews for problems that had no excuse to exist. Invariably, someone would chime in with, "I bought a bike from Bikes Direct, and it has been fine," and I would respond with, "All that proves is that the failure rate is not 100%. That's not very useful information."
What usually happens then is that they get discouraged, and two years later when the bike is hanging in their garage with two flat tires and a thick layer of dust and you ask, "Hey, how's the cycling going?", they usually answer, "Oh, I guess cycling just wasn't for me," not realizing that almost anyone would conclude the same thing if they start with such junk. At the time (probably around 2012), the bottom of the line of real road bikes from most major manufacturers (Trek, Specialized, Giant, BMC, etc.), sold in bike shops, cost about $700 IIRC; and since the competition there was pretty stiff, you'd get approximately the same thing from all of them, meaning one was not not really any better than another, as long as you bought from one of the major manufacturers of real road bikes, not imitation junk.
We also strongly recommended against buying online, since the newbie needs the support of a real bike shop for proper assembly, fit, maintenance, and other things, and online sellers like Bikes Direct had tons of bad reviews for problems that had no excuse to exist. Invariably, someone would chime in with, "I bought a bike from Bikes Direct, and it has been fine," and I would respond with, "All that proves is that the failure rate is not 100%. That's not very useful information."
