True, I don't know anything about your bike shop. You could have the greatest LBS to grace the shores of the great state of Texas, or you could be the most crooked bastard to ever take up the wheel. I have no idea. What I do know is that your first response when a member asked why you could want a private forum for shop employees is that you don't want the regular Joe cyclist to know what you pay wholesale. This tells me that it's important to you that you keep this information from your customers, presumably so you can get away with charging them as much as you can (I can't see why else). My argument was that if you do offer the best value/service then you have no reason to hide this information; customers will come to you because you're the best. And, as I said before, if you're not then you don't deserve their money.
And you're probably right about one thing. If I strolled into Dell and started demanding to know what they pay for product, they'd laugh me out of the building. However, if I ran a bulletin board for computer enthusiasts, and Michael Dell came along and told me to make a private forum so he and Mr. Compaq, Mr. Hewlett-Packard, and the rest of his buddies could talk behind the backs of the rest of the membership, I'd tell him to sod off.