Originally Posted by Wilfred Laurier

It seems that a lot of bike companies don't actually expect their bikes to be ridden, and this attitude often pays off... say Manufacturer X saves $5 on each bike it equips with a certain cost-cutting part, but that part is expected to have a 20% failure rate. Manufacturer X sells 200,000 bikes per year with that part, so this decision saved them $1,000,000 during production. Manufacturer X knows that 50% of its bikes are only ridden a couple of times before being moved to the back of the garage as a dust collector, so they only expect 10% of those cheap parts to come back. They probably also expect not all people will realize that they can get a free replacement under warranty, or will otherwise chose to fix the part on their own - maybe another 50%. So of the 40,000 potential defective parts they need to replace, they expect to be held responsible for about 5,000. This is all worked into the initial cost of the bike. In the OP's case, they probably got wheels from a vendor who delivered at a substantial discount, but they underestimated the number of failures and are having a hard time keeping up.