If you've ever listened to the customers when they're looking at these kind of bikes, it's easy to understand why they get away with this stuff. I heard one lady exclaim "A bike is a bike, I don't know why those bike shops charge so much for those bikes. We only need something to ride locally, why pay all that money". And her freind agreed. It made me sick.
So to summarize, you have an uneducated ad writer selling a product assembled by an untrained stock room clerk to a naive consumer. Talk about your formiula for disaster.