Berrics Consumer Report

You know, I always assumed/took for granted that skateboards you bought at Walmart or other large discount chains were not too good. I have to admit though that sometimes I thought to myself that maybe they weren’t a bad idea for a first deck if somebody was starting out.

To be clear, I’m way too old to fall on concrete or asphalt, so I didn’t test that hypothesis myself. Happily, The Berrics Consumer Report has.

I can’t help but remind you that it’s basically one guy testing a couple of boards and that he’s doing things some skaters never do.  But the results seem so compelling that even I, who believe in large sample sizes, statistical validation, comparisons against a norm, and all sort of statistical stuff took notice.

So here’s the link to the video they did where Chris Joslin tests a couple of Walmart completes.  The reporter, if that’s what you call people who do this on Berrics, is Yoon Sul.  Spoiler alert! The damn things practically collapse. To be fair, these are hardly unbiased testers. And I would have liked Chris to have put one of his boards through the same routine and shown us the difference.

But I’m a finance guy by training, and when you see that they’ve bought three completes for $90.34, you almost don’t even need to see the test. Yes, I hoped that somehow Walmart had enough purchasing power that a new skater might be getting a half way decent starter complete. But even as I hoped it, I know enough about product cost in the industry to know it wasn’t going to happen. As the video points out, these decks are cheap in ways I didn’t even know you could make a deck cheap.

For better or worse, there are good deals out there on reasonably quality decks, but I’d say it’s not at Walmart. Thanks Berrics!