Originally Posted by
aley
Yeah, I stay away from the sleazy companies that do that. There's this one fly-by-night company called Trek, which also pretends to have separate companies that build bikes called Gary Fisher and Lemond, but if you do a little looking you find that they're really all the same people.
1st page of the Trek site has a link to the "Gary Fisher Collection". How do you get more obvious than that? I think they've dropped the Lemond brand.
The BikesDirect site makes it look like they don't own any brands at all. They appear to be just a reseller giving you a great deal on a named brand bikes. Not sure why people have such a difficult time understanding the difference between that and what QBP does. QBP helped build the Surly brand.
BikesDirect sells unassembled complete bikes with more or less generic frames like the kind Nashbar sells. Nothing wrong with that. Nashbar doesn't pretend the frames are anything other than what they are. Why does BD?