A bikey visit to the carrefour

A few blocks from our hotel in corsica was a big Carrefour market. If you are not familiar with it, thinkWallmart with even slower employees at the checkout line.

Of course, I headed to the bike dept immediately to see what passes for french bike crud. I was pretty impressed. While the bikes they sold were very typical Wallmart type MTB crap, the parts were pretty interesting. They had lots of post type cantilever brakes and straddle cables on the parts wall. They also had, gasp, 650B stuff. Is there no limit to the influence of grant peterson?


Crappy 650B spare tire:

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Nice presta 650B tubes, only 3euro80, which is something like a million dollars US, or maybe about 5 bucks and a dime:

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I bought a two pack of 650B schrader tubes for something like $5 Us equivalent. They appear to be seamless tubes, not too shabby...

They also had these pretty nice looking Richard Virenque branded shimano road wheelsets with decent looking Michelin tires (129euro, 173buckeroonies):

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I also picked up a couple of packs of these sweet little step down ferrules, I think they are intended for touring type brakes, but they should be useful for dumb projects, a mere 0.83 euros for a 4 pack:

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they had a bewildering array of patch kits, that frankly looked all the same to me, yet varied by a few cents here or there. I picked up a high end looking michelin kit with patches that appeared to be a bit more flexy or not. I had trouble finding an unopened one, when I got it home I realized why. The kits look huge, but have only 4 patches in it, I think people were stealing patches from the kits on the hanger and placing them in the kits they buy. Way to fight the man!

Finally I picked up this excellent Ensemble de Gonflage, with two types of beachball inflators, a ball needle, a presta to schrader adapter and the rare schrader to presta adapter all for only 4 euros or so:

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After I selected my items, I headed to the checkout line and watched the women working the cash register talk to each other for the 20 minutes it took to process me and the four ahead of me in the "no cart" lane. In France, the man sticks it back to you. I was glad to see that half of the line I was in were visibly impatient too. The lines in the cart lanes looked to be the better part of an hour in length.

All told they had some good bike stuff, I regret not buying assorted types of cantilever/centerpull straddle wires as they had quite an array and they were pretty inexpensive. Good stuff. Go carrefourhell.