I mean; I build my own wheels, and have built wheels for friends at cost...no charge for my labor, save for maybe some beers. Fairly recently a friend asked me to build him a basic Open Pro/105 wheel set, and I had to tell my buddy that he would actually do better buying from Performance. I couldn't source the parts alone for as cheap as Performance was selling the built up wheelset.

How on earth do wheel builders turn any profit at all?