Originally Posted by Iride01

Street clothes are fine. But do you even know if the shop will let you test ride the bike? Some don't even let you ride around the parking lot. I feel lucky that the shop here let me ride a lower tier model of the bike I was looking at for as far as I wished. Perhaps part of the reason was that the tier level of the bike I was looking at was somewhat high. It might have been a different deal if I was only looking for a $1000 bike.

In my case my legs and height had me straddling two different size frames in that model. And the shop had two lower tier models of that bike in those sizes. I tried them both out in the large parking lot and picked the larger size. However they offered to let me ride them out away from the shop on the local MUP which is a good mix of hilly terrain with a few flatter areas. And more representative of the rides I normally do. So I came back a day or two later dressed up in my usual riding attire and brought my pedals and bike shoes and my water bottle which I kept in my back jersey pocket since the bikes didn't have bottle cages installed.

I rode each for just over ten miles and found that the smaller frame size felt much better. I think part of that was the fact that the crank length changed and I don't do well with long cranks. I've pretty much always used short cranks compared to others. And the longer cranks actually wore me out as I felt like my legs were thrashing going up and down so far. As well bar width changed to wider on the larger size bike and that braced me too much making my shoulders sore.

But even on a 10 mile ride, you aren't going to get the same complaints from your body about the bike that you will on a 50 or 100 mile ride. You still will have to realize that what you pick might not be what you expect for longer rides. So again, if you have little bike experience today, get a bike that you can afford to throw away and start over with another bike.

I say throw away, because depending on the demands for bikes in your area, you might get stuck with something that there won't be a buyer you can find willing to pay what it's worth.