Quote:
Originally Posted by sarion
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This is for a top notch builder who has thousands of frames out there. If the market can't bear that price, he'll just have to drop it - and I think he commented here or across the hall that some framebuilders thought he could and should charge higher.
That said, if you Google
Baumol's cost disease ... when some sectors of the economy display a rise in labor productivity and some don't, the ones that don't have their prices go up a lot faster, which is the Baumol effect aka disease. The big framebuilders can and do mass produce, which is the very definition of increased labor productivity. The one man custom shops of the world have to build by hand, and I don't foresee that their labor productivity can increase (once you get up to a certain skill level, that's about it). So, I think the one man shops are either going to get more expensive, or they'll have to accept lower wages if the market can't bear their price.
From what Steelman said, he was doing the latter. That's not right. Imo labor is generally under-compensated in the US - there are certainly a number of egregious union contracts, but given that most of the US is not unionized, they would be the exception. But on the flip side, that means that gradually, the one man shops are going to get less affordable for cyclists.
I could afford a Vanilla at my relatively young age as I got clobbered by a truck and I got a settlement from the guy's insurance company (albeit it could have been 3x larger and it still wouldn't have been worth it). If I hadn't, I'm honestly not sure it would have been worth it to me with what I'm presently earning, which is good but not Wall Street (and imo Wall Street is way overcompensated relative to the actual value they produce). I'm not saying it wasn't, just that I'm not sure I would have been able to produce the change.