The Soul Of Skateboarding skateboarding

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Flawed - okay, but none the less, I cannot resist to question the movement of the DON'T DO IT army and everyone else touting the "anti-outsourcing" slogan.

One thing we can all be sure of. When a company is in the business of selling skateboarding products of any sort, they're either turning some kind of a profit or they won't be around next month.

With that laid out, it's fairly easy to side with the major skateboarding brands. They sponsor pros, they put out videos and they pride them selfs on making reputable products of quality and they've been around for many months.

But is that it? Are we all content with buying brand names because we are "supporting the soul of skateboarding"?

There is no doubt reasoning behind you saying Yes to this.

But what about the mystical creature that is "blank decks"?

They are often sold by places you have only see on the internet.
They cost anywhere from half to a third of a full priced brand name deck.
They're often worse in quality.

Let's start with that last point, worse in quality. You all know this, and it's an assumption we will make in this article whether it be true or not...
Many North American deck manufacturers would probably attempt to explain to you that you are being cheated by buying such a deck -- That Chinese wood is of worse quality and you as a fine citizen of some great country only deserve the best.
And thats fine... Hell, its hard to be honest when loosing your business is the other side of things.

My question is, when the hell did skateboarders themselves get there heads chopped off and start touting the anti-outsourcing slogan?

You know they're worse in quality, and for the premise of this argument, you can assume that they're worse by a factor less than 1:2 (Very likely true for most skaters, though of course it depends...)

So with these two assumptions, you are clearly getting more bang for your buck by buying two slightly worse boards than 1 "good" one.

1board x 100% quality = 1 board
2boards x 75% quality = 1.5 boards
3boards x 65% quality = 2 boards (1.95 actually)
Pretty simple?

Let's look at this further. Another obvious gain with the blank decks is the pleasure of feeling the, brand-new-crip-popping feel more frequently. Clearly, an argument is that this feeling is again, of worse quality. Fair game. Another downside is your causing more waste for the planet (un-researched). Another point is the potential harm you might endure when a worse-quality board breaks during a key moment...

So this isn't all about simple bang-for-your-buck math. And it's not a definite argument either.

My simple statement is that the most important part of the "soul of skateboarding" is you, the skater.

If you live in Canada, like myself, you've surely endured paying typically $70-$90 for a brand-name deck, and if its near the lower-end of that spectrum, you might find yourself paying another $8 for griptape.
With our Canadian dollar pretty much on par with the US it's interesting to see that local shops are not matching the $50 prices that the US seems to have for pro-decks. If you have found otherwise in your area, I'd consider yourself lucky. Even Canadian-online shops, stereotypically cheaper, are still selling major name-brand boards at $75 and charging $12 or $15 for grip tape.

So tell me, how could you possibly slap a DON'T DO IT army sticker on the face of a person who instead spends $60 and gets 5 boards with grip tape of quite reasonable quality and still pockets an extra $27 over purchasing a brand name deck?

The joke of this situation is the fools: shop owners, skaters, or deck manufacturers, who continue to look more like fascists than people who aim to do good for skaters.

Jeff of BlankSkateSupply.com posted on this forum quite an interesting post in a thread regarding blank decks:

...Some of the posts stated that "blanks" don't give back to the skateboarding. And you may be shocked to find out that I actually believe that. I don't belive in dumping mass quantities of imported skateboards into the market or dumping them on popular auction sites. That does not contribute anything to skateboarding. It only serves to line the pockets of those who do it.
see full.

Clearly, one such example of "dumping mass quantities of imported skateboards [...] on popular auction sites" is Cyres, which sells there decks on Ebay.

In all fairness, no disrespect is intended to Jeff, especially because his shop focuses on the USA market in which my mentioned examples and argument don't apply with the same extremity. More so, because despite Blank Skate Supply selling great blank decks, they do make a great effort to give back to skateboarding, as Jeff mentions later in the same post. Even the comments and replies to our review of Blank Skate Supply's blank decks were positive, if our own stamp of approval is not enough to warrant our approval of Jeff and Blank Skate Supply.

But back to the point -- and the argument that most drastically applies to Canadian skaters. Though we have no official review of "Cyres Skateboards", I myself, and several friends have skated them before. Though some have broken in their first 10 minutes on big flip-tricks to boardslides on a handrail, others have not. They all come with "Grits Griptape", yet another random brand with quite a good quality product.

So let's do the math one more time, this time not beating around the bush with an attempt to be general, but focusing on the Canadian skater and the specific example of Cyres Skateboards off ebay.

If one brand name deck can cost us $75 + $12 (= $87) (forget taxes for this example) and we call it "100% quality" for the sake of math then we get:

1 board x 100% = 1 board.

If we assume that board was bought at a local shop, or simply that shipping was free, we can then do a fair comparison and say that $60 was spent for 5 blank Cyres boards with 5 sheets of good (but not brand name) grip tape and we factor in $25 for shipping (as shown on the auction page).
Now, of course the importance of quality is going to be up to you to decide.

I beleive in the minds of beginners, Cyres boards and their grip would get assigned something around an 80%-90% quality (a bit abstract, I know). The more skilled, the more importance would likely be placed on quality (depending on skating style and other obvious factors). Assuming the reasonable: for the skill level of what I would call average for the user base of this site and for a street skater, I'd give Cyres boards a 70% quality rating with respect to a pro-board.

So in the end we get $85 in costs and a variable of quality dependent on you, but in my example which you are freely able to test and comment on for yourself, we get:

5 boards x 70% = 3.5 boards

So we've reached this obvious conclusion that blanks are the way to go if you're in Canada-- we've deducted this 7:2 ratio.
If you doubt my words, try them out. I can assure you I have no stake in Cyres Skateboards nor any Chinese manufacturer of boards.
There are many branches that can be picked at in this article, but the stump is what's at hand: Canadians.

I'll restate again that this argument is focused on Canada. I do not live in the states and from what I see, I think their current situation is significantly less amplified.

My interests are in "the soul of skateboarding", the core of which I earlier stated is you, the skateboarders.
The strange thing this is "the soul of skateboarding" is the same thing that deck manufacturers and the DON'T DO IT army website both claim to support.

In the end, I only ask you to consider that if "the industry" is acting like a fascist government and attempting to slap a DON'T DO IT sticker in your face for doing the logical, remember what you really are doing:

Skateboarding.

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