Originally Posted by
obed7
I was in there at lunch one day last year when a guy came in with a schwinn in the box that he had bought at a local box store and asked them how much they would charge him to put it together. They told him they would assemble it for $100. The guy complained that he had not paid much more than that for the bike...they had no sympathy... it seems that here in the Houston area the box stores sell the bikes unassembled and you have the choice of putting it together yourself or risking their stock person assembling it for a fee.
What is the hourly rate for mechanical work at that LBS? The assembly of a boxed bike should require no additional parts and I can't imagine proper assembly of a typical boxed bike would take more than an hour; UNLESS the shop was trying to pad the bill (or chase away the customer) by claiming that any new bike with a Big Box Store provenance needed a complete overhaul right out of the box.