I see that some bike shops are still willing to take on jobs that they know nothing about. I suppose it is a result of machine built wheels selling in much greater proportion but their practices are still inexcusable.

For those of who with shops which clearly cannot be relied upon, I will suggest that you build the wheels yourself. A book I strongly recommend for anyone wishing to build functional, reliable wheels and/or understand their workings and failures is The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt. Of course you will seldom find this book at a LBS, especially one who builds poor wheels.

His thesis is that a vast majority of spoke breakage is due to lack of 'stress relieving'. See:

http://yarchive.net/bike/stress_relieve.html

When you have sucessfully built your first set of wheels, consider lending the book to the poor shop technician, who no doubt has never heard of it.