I maintain 10 bicycles in my home, and perform free maintenance/adjustment/repair on the bikes of at least a dozen friends annually, and do roughly five to 10 complete ground-up builds/flips per year for spending money - or for friends.

The proposotion above, that one could own a new department store bike each year and do less total maintenance as compared with the workload involved in keeping one fine bike running...that statement boggles the mind. The department store bike would need significant adjustment/tuning, repacking/adjustment of bearings, adjustment of hubs, tightening of fasteners, truing of wheels, and even replacement of failed components every year as it arrives. That would be prior to riding. In terms of wear and tear - there would be suspension fork failures and the like, too.

The savings would be in replacing cables and chains, and bar tape, I guess, since the department store bike is discarded each winter. But the headaches of trying to get poor quality components to perform within acceptable (to me) tolerances would drive me batty...