True words. I wanted an endurance bike during the pandemic - ah the bad old masked days. I found a bike on-line and ordered it from L.A. Spoke to the shop owner quite extensively before the purchase. When it arrived, it had the stock set-up, so I measured my old bike (which come to find out later was not remotely setup correctly) and used those dimensions. It took me three bike fittings, and then countless re-adjustments moving the saddle forward/backward, seat post up/down, adjusting the reach of the bars (I have a nice collection of stems) and other tweaks to get the bike to finally be comfortable. Not to mention buying a collection of new seats until I found one that works ‘pretty good’.

Now if I had gone to a shop (but most of them were not open due to the pandemic) and rode some bikes and had them adjusted by people in the know, it would have possibly saved me months of grief, rather than buying on ‘off the rack’.