::: spoiler The funny thing is that this was somewhere between buying a bike at Walmart or Bikes Direct. This was an attempt to bypass the dealer's ("agents" in the nomenclature of the era) margin overhead and sell at wholesale pricing direct to consumers. They're acting like a rogue distributor, which is exactly what Amazon is doing in general today.

No reputable brands can engage with any business on this direct to consumer level. From a manufacturing perspective, what and how much of a product to produce is a major dilemma. The only way to mitigate this dilemma is to do preseason ordering with dealers that can predict their future local market with accuracy. The manufacturer proposes a set of products and costs while the dealers decide what they are confident enough to invest in. The manufacturer makes the bulk margin on bikes while the dealer is in the game to sell accessories in order to break even on the business as a whole while all profit is generated by servicing bikes. There are usually margins between 25-45% from ultra high end to bargain junk bikes, and most accessories sold are at least keystone (50%). However, overburden inventory is what kills most bike shops within a decade.

I was a professional Buyer for a chain of bike shops. I specialized in managing overburden using statistics based nonintuitive ordering mixed with an intuitive understanding of more esoteric factors, along with eBay, Craigslist, and swap meets. I also prevented a lot of bad orders for specialty service items. So this is my wheelhouse.

Not much has changed in 120 years. In the post I made after this one on the bicycle related stuff present in a single issue of The Iron Age from 1894 there was a chainless bike (that would have weighed a ton), a 19 pound "race weight" bike, aluminum rim wheels for clincher tires, a price listing for $100+ bikes that have sold "6000 units last season", a bike trainer that can be wheeled around for demonstration purposes and then used while still equipped, and a nonchalant ad from Pope Mfg., toting the established hegemony of Columbia which indeed was the Specialized brand of the era. There is even a suspension fork design mentioned... I think it was that one... I read another issue of The Iron Age on Archive from 1888, but it does not have pretty engravings everywhere. That may have been where the suspension was published.

In the blablabla from this Sears catalog, they also mention some marketing figures for their market share. This kind of advertising is always inflated and full of lies, but the conservative nature of only claiming 25% of tire sales in the market and the number of low end bikes at 400k (IIRC), hints that the market was absolutely massive. I already knew that from books about the era, but it is fun to point it out to others.

Cycling was the first really big sport and eclipsed everything else by a long shot. Humans were going faster than horses and most trains for short bursts. They were riding for days at a time in the velodrome to see how far a human could race for distance in days. Seven day long events were popular and common. Like Madison Square Garden was a velodrome.

Most of the velodromes that still exist in the USA are from this era. There is only one indoor velodrome in all of North America and it is from the '84 Olympics in Los Angeles. It is freaking awesome to go to. You can't even begin to walk up the turns because they are so steep. The next closest is in Mexico City... but my digression digresses...

Humans were fascinated by becoming so much more efficient with locomotion. The only form of locomotion that is more efficient in nature is bird flight.

The bicycle was the main catalyst for women's suffrage. The equality of marketing women's and men's bikes here was very novel. Prior to the bicycle, women rarely left the home without someone escorting them. It was mostly due to utility and purpose as travel was not easy or frivolous.

The carbide lamps mentioned here would have been awful. It is making acetylene using solid calcium carbide. So basically it is an ultra sooty flame like an oxyacetylene torch without the oxygen.

The railroad attachment was probably the most fun and dangerous accessory. There were not many abandoned lines back then. But there were not paved roads like today either. It was mostly dirt with some cobbles in the city.

Anyways that is my take in depth. The accessories and range are deeply familiar and cover most of what I would be stocking in a shop today.

That is like $600 which is still a lot for a fixie.

I was going to make a joke about how many nickels that was because everything cost a nickel back then.

Then I zoomed in on the ad.

The whole damn thing is nickel.

Anyway, a farm laborer in Missouri earned about 99¢ / day in 1899. So about 16 days pay.

Or 315 nickels.

$15.75 in 1902 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $577.79 today, an increase of $562.04 over 122 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.00% per year between 1902 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 3,568.52%.

We're getting hosed.

Brakes were a rarity and more like a novelty for newfangled coaster wheel models only. They were not powerful enough to really stop a person as well as the fixies as we call them today. It may seem unintuitive but you can easily create back pressure on the pedals without a freewheeling mechanism in a hub. You use this back pressure to stop. You can also shift your weight around and make the rear wheel lock up and slide easily. The simplicity of this arrangement and the light weight are why the bicycle was possible so early. Basically as soon as a chain became manufacturable the safety cycles became a thing. Even before this, as soon as piano wire and rim technology allowed, people started making and riding the earliest forms of cycles with cranks attached directly to a wheel. The earliest cycle like device was made from two wooden cart wheels and a board in the middle that looked like a kid's running bike and it was only used for coasting down hills.