Agreed. Funny how shipping direct-to-customer should reduce costs as the middleman (i.e., your LBS) is no longer part of the equation, yet I predict Specialized bike prices won't drop 1 cent.

I also predict all the other major brands will follow-suit within the next 2 years and we'll start to see LBS's start to close I'm a child of the 1980's and there were all sorts of specialty stores I loved to visit as a kid that were killed-off by the Internet, including skateboard shops, snowboard shops, hobby shops, inline skate shops, etc.

As a person who does my own "wrenching" on my bikes, I personally don't visit the LBS very often. However, the general public is often not very mechanically inclined and simply changing a flat tire is a challenge for some. It'll be interesting to see if squeezing-out the LBS results in losing a large swath of customers that finds bicycle maintenance too complicated and thus decides not to buy a bike. Heck, I'm a software programmer and mechanically inclined, yet understanding how to setup and customize my bike's Shimano Ultegra Di2 system had quite a learning curve that I'm sure "Joe-shmo Public" isn't going to want to do.