As part of my eat less, move more program, I’ve gotten back into cycling. In fact, a number of the 1995 Pastry Powered T(o)uring Machines are back in action, once again doing STP - the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Ride. It’s a 200 mile 1- or 2-day trek from Seattle to, um, Portland. Kinda says it all in the title, really.

My cycling gear is about a decade or more old. My road bike is a blue 1996 Bianchi Eros, so 10 years old now, and in need of a bit of love. My good pair of riding shorts are an ancient (10+ years) pair of Bellwether shorts (held up well though) and I’m still on the last lens (amber) from my 3-lens Smith riding glasses. My helmet is over a decade old. My old Nike Poobahs (MTB shoes) are pretty destroyed and uncomfortable, and after a couple rides, even though I’m getting closer to the weight I was, I gotta say my butt was really sore in the saddle. Oh, and I have a daughter now who wants to come with me. So, time to gear up!

In Seattle, we have a wealth of quality cycling shops… such as Gregg’s Cycles (although I’ll still call ‘em Gregg’s Greenlake Cycles, which was their name before they expanded). However, if you can’t make it there because you’re working in Redmond and traffic is a nightmare, you might want to shop online.
I first started browsing for a trailer. I could always pick a Burley, which is the one everyone around here has. But on the advice of a friend (who loaned me hers to make sure Laura liked riding in the trailer), I decided to check out the competition. Eventually, I found a few good sites that told me what I wanted, but it was just so… frickin… painful. Ultimately, there aren’t a lot of reviews out there for bike trailers, so finding the 3 useful pages is in fact a bit of a chore. Luckily, it was late at night and I didn’t have much else to do, but for rare purchases things should be better. Ended up getting a Chariot Cougar I, by the way.

I then started browsing for a new saddle. Didn’t know what the brands were, what the features were, how well they’d fit my butt, and so forth. Searched and searched… and searched and searched and searched and searched…. blah. Eventually pieced together enough to have a reasonable opinion, I think, and even ordered a saddle. But not sure if it’s going to work… but hey, 30-day money-back guarantee is always nice. Did the same thing with helmets… blarg. After a while doing that, I punted and just went to Gregg’s.

The moral? Shopping search when you’re looking for a commodity, or looking for reviews on a known item (such as a movie or camera lens or whatever) isn’t a tough problem to solve. Sure, all of the engines out there favor the sales sites vs review, mostly as retail shops are all spamming optimizing themselves. However, when you don’t know much about what you want to buy, the amount of work you have to go through is enormous — to the point where just going down to a retailer is by far the fastest way to get what you want — even with 520 traffic.

There’s gotta be something better… and this is something I’m going to think on. This is a common enough user scenario, and I think with a little bit of thought we can hopefully come up with something that solves the entire experience… from researching, to comparing items, to finally purchasing one.

But for the time being… well, I’m thankful for Gregg’s and REI.