Thrift Week 2024, Day 5: A $30 lock on a $15 bike

To put this Thrift Week post in context, I need to provide a little background. This is a story I never got around to discussing on the blog when it happened, partly because it was a bit embarrassing for us. I told you about how, when Brian's old junker of a bike finally bit the dust in 2012, we bought him a nice, new bicycle to replace it. It cost us $400, but we thought it was a good investment, since he expected to be using it for many years to come. Here's the part you didn't hear: within a year after we bought it, that nice, new bicycle was stolen from the bike rack at his workplace. 

The reason this is embarrassing for us is that it's possible we could have prevented it. At the time we bought the new bike, we didn't invest in a new lock for it, because Brian was pretty confident that the old, heavy chain he was using was sturdy enough to prevent theft. But he was thinking in terms of casual theft, and the thieves who actually came for his bike were professionals. They drove up in a big, black van, parked it in such a way that it blocked the view of the bike rack from security cameras, and then systematically removed all the bicycles from the rack and drove off with them. As far as I know, none of them were ever recovered. His beautiful new ride probably ended up being stripped down for parts. And since its value was less than our insurance deductible, there was no way to recover any of what we'd spent on it.

Well, after that, we weren't about to spend a lot of money on another nice, new bike. Instead, I searched Craigslist and found a seller in Princeton offering not one, but two bicycles in rideable condition for $30. We drove down, checked them out, paid in cash, managed to get both bicycles into the back of our little Honda Fit, and brought them home, giving Brian one bike for everyday use and a spare for parts. (We've since acquired yet another one from Freecycle, which explains why there are three bikes—or more precisely, two and a half—crammed into our back room.)

After that, we had to replace all the equipment that had been on the old bike when it was stolen—including the lock that had so dramatically failed to protect it. So we went back to the same shop where we'd bought the previous bike and invested $30 in a top-of-the-line Kryptonite lock—a purchase that, if we'd made it sooner, might have been enough to deter the thieves and save Brian's old bike. (Professional thieves can get through one of those too, with the right tools, but it takes time, and they might have decided it wasn't worth it.) Thus, Brian's current ride is protected by a lock that cost roughly twice as much as the bike itself. This gives him two layers of protection: a lock that's hard for even professional thieves to get through, and a bike so cheap that it's not really worth the effort. 

This $60 set of equipment—riding bike, spare bike, and lock—is a major money-saver. Each time Brian rides his bike to work or to the grocery stores, he saves money on gas, as well as and wear and tear on our car. One way to estimate the total savings is to use the IRS's mileage reimbursement figure, which is currently 67 cents per mile. Brian's daily commute to work is about four miles each way, and he makes the trip an average of twice a week (roughly four times a week in the summer, about once a week in the winter, and varying amounts in between) for 50 weeks a year. That's a total of 100 eight-mile round trips, or 800 miles, and he probably makes another six-mile round trip to the grocery store every two weeks or so, adding about another 150 miles. That makes 950 miles at 67 cents per mile, for a total of $636.50 in savings every single year.

To be fair, this number is probably a serious overestimate. In the first place, the IRS's mileage reimbursement is based on the average vehicle, and ours is much smaller than average. In the second place, Brian no longer drives to work on most of the days he doesn't ride the bike. The pandemic established that his job could reasonably be done from home, so now he's only required to go into the office once a week. The rest of the time, he only goes in to work on days when he can reasonably ride there. So he's probably only saving himself around 40 trips to the office (the one day a week he would otherwise have to drive, assuming weather permits him to make the trip by bike 80 percent of the time). But according to the government's fuel economy calculator, the gas alone for that trip costs him about 80 cents each way, or 20 cents per mile. So even if Brian is only avoiding 470 miles of driving per year, that's still a savings of at least $94 per year on a one-time investment of $60 nearly 12 years ago. I'd say it has clearly paid for itself many times over in fuel savings alone—not even counting what it could be saving us on medical bills by helping Brian stay in better shape at 53 than he was 30 years ago.