To the OP: The problem with five people using a bike is that no one feels responsible for the bike. So, when the tires starts rubbing the brake, the rider just finishes the ride and forgets it. The next guy notices it, and also just does his ride. The next guy uses the quick-adjust to open the brakes all the way so he can do his ride ... then parks it and ignores it.Then someone notices that the wheel is so warped it rubs the fork---no one ever bothered to keep the spokes tight (and in my experience cheap wheels, particularly ones which hit a lot of bumps, go out of true early and often.
Same happens to the rear wheel, but here a spoke breaks ... and then two more. Now the wheel is shot because they are drive-side spokes and no one knows how to get the cassette off.
Meanwhile the lava dust mixes with water from that last rainstorm and works its way deep inside every pivot and rotating mechanism, and starts abrading things ... and gets into the cables and hardens into cement. Because nobody bothers to wash the bike, or to lubricate it, or even really knows how .... but no one cares about the cables anyway because the brakes are useless---full open to clear the warped rims, everybody does Flintstone stops---and the derailleurs don't get used because they were never properly adjusted, and after the cables stretched, they were pretty useless anyone, so everyone rides it in whatever gear it happened to be in when everything else stopped working.
With the lave paste hardening in the cheap chain and clogging the rear wheel bearings, pretty much nobody wants to ride the bike uphill, and with no brakes, going downhill eats up sneaker soles really quickly .... and of course, the repair costs far exceed the purchase cost of the bike .... so after 60 days the Wal-Mart bikes is now yard art.
But I'd rather see a Wal-Mart bike get trashed like that instead of a really worthwhile bike.