My Nerdy Life

Saving Money Through a ‘Bro Deal’ Out of the Back of a Van

Sometimes the best deals can be found when you’re not looking for them. One of the remaining upgrades I’ve been wanting to make for my bike was adding a dropper post. Unfortunately, it’s quite an expensive upgrade and considering how much I’ve already spent this year on my bike I was holding off on getting one, until now!

For those that don’t know, a dropper post allows you to drop your seat on the fly using a remote on your handlebars. This is particularly useful when the terrain changes to a downhill section where it’s helpful to lower your seat to give you more room to maneuver. Up until the last few years, the only way to achieve this effect would be to get off your bike and manually raise/lower your seat. That approach isn’t so bad if you do the sort of ride where you climb for a long time to the top of a mountain, and then come all the way back down. Realistically though, most trails have a mix of up and down throughout, making it annoying to have to fiddle with your seat post all the time. It’s especially annoying if you don’t know the trail very well and you don’t know if the section ahead is an up or a down, so  more often than not I’d leave it in the raised position and sacrifice some maneuverability on the downhills. This meant I was great at climbing, but lost speed and actually made things more dangerous when doing down a gnarly trail.

So one of the last upgrades I’d been considering since purchasing my bike last year was to get a dropper post. There’s a slew of options, but one of the most popular is the Rock Shox Reverb. It’s a hydraulically actuated, air spring seat post that raises and lowers to any height with the touch of a button on the handlebars. Now you may think a mechanism to let you raise and lower your seat would be a simple affair, but it turns out it’s not. In fact, in someways hydraulic brakes could be considered simpler devices than a dropper post. The Reverb has three separate fluid chambers that have to work in tandem to do it’s magic. There’s the hydraulic remote control that connects the handlebars to the seat post, an air spring that raises the seat, and an oil chamber in the post that keeps the post firm in the raised position. Not to mention the bushings and valves required to make everything work. They also have to be built strong enough to withstand the harsh non-uniform forces being applied by the rider. In rough terrain, you rarely stay seated for very long causing all kinds of stress on the mechanism, which is one of the reasons that other systems don’t last long.

So while the MSRP of $370 USD is quite steep, I can somewhat understand why. The prices have come down a bit over time, but it’s rare to find it for less than $400 CAD at a bike shop. The best I could find was on clearance online for ~$360 CAD. Which no matter how you slice it, is a lot of money for what is effectively a glorified height-adjustable office chair!

Enter the bro deal or bro-dette deal?… not sure what the female version of a bro deal would be called, if there is such a term? Anyway, yesterday I was out for a ride with a local group that I occasionally ride with. They’re not close friends, more like acquaintances that love riding bikes. Half way through the ride, the one guy commented that he had a Reverb he was trying to sell and it just so happened to be the right size for my bike. It was off of his “old” bike that he had only used for 3 months before getting a new one that already came with it, and when he sold his old bike the buyer didn’t want/need it. So for the past few weeks he’s been driving around with this dropper post in his van trying to sell it.

Tangent: although I silently gave him crap for spending so much on a bike only to flip it after 3 months for a different bike, I gave him props for buying a $1000 van just so he could splurge on a bike! He even went as far as to say as a car is just for getting from point A to B, but bikes are to have fun! It always amuses me to see when the value of a bikers car doubles or even quadruples as soon as they put their bike inside it, haha. 

I asked him how much he wanted for it and he said he was trying to get $300, but since I’d ridden with him a few times and he knew it would go to a good home (a fellow bike enthusiast), he was willing to drop his price to $200. SCORE for the Bro Deal! We finished our ride, I checked out the merchandise, had the money transferred, and within an hour had a nearly new dropper post in hand!

It’s amazing what kind of deals you can get through friends or even just a casual acquaintance. I find it also helps when the seller knows the item will be taken care of and appreciated by the buyer. I’d say most people that have invested a lot into a bike or a car or something of the sort develop an emotional attachment and would much rather see their item continue to be enjoyed by the new owner than get trashed even if it means getting less money for it. If you think about it, the guy basically paid me to (a) get it off his hands and (b) help a fellow bike rider out. It’s just one of the many perks of getting together with a group of like-minded enthusiasts.

What have you guys/gals gotten a sweet deal on thanks to a “bro deal”?