Originally Posted by Zephyr11

You're making this harder than it needs to be. That's something that's easy to do before you actually start looking at bikes. When I went to buy my full-suspension, the first mountain bike I actually bought from a bike shop and not off Craigslist, I went to about six stores, came on here and begged for advice and started a big long involved topic on the relative merits of each bike versus the other ones, spent hours on each company's website comparing component specs and geometry...and you know what? The bike I ended up buying wasn't one of the bikes that I had asked about on BikeForums and wasn't one that I had included in my comparison. It was the one that I got on to test ride and fell in love with. Test ride as many bikes as you can. Buy the one that you don't want to stop riding.

In the bikes I've gotten from shops, I've gotten one floor model and the rest were ordered from the company because they didn't have the component spec or whatever that I wanted.