Originally Posted by garage sale GT

I've gotten a fair amount of use out of department store bikes twice.

You hear the occasional horror story but some people who've tried them seem satisfied, though it is necessary to be able to tweak stuff sometimes.

BTW you must have worked at Huffy just before they concluded it was just too expensive to build bikes in the US, which suggests they had tried reducing costs as much as was practical including getting their people to work too fast. They may have been using temps for reasons related to beginning to shut down, in fact.

In any case, your experience stopped being relevant in 1999 when Huffy stopped building bikes here.

We don't know how it is in Shanghai, but I bet they could spend more time on each bike if they chose. I also bet they have enough work that their facilities are staffed by well-practiced regulars. There is also no reason to assume they use temps in order to screw workers out of benefits, because there is no reason to assume their labor laws are anything like ours.