Tonight's LBS experience:

I went in with a low-end Blackburn floor pump I'd bought at the "Super Sale" for about $18 a couple weeks ago. It was pushing air out of where the barrel meets the base at about 90 PSI. They didn't have any more packaged, and only one "on the floor", so we tried it. The presta head gasket was shot. So we put the head from my pump onto the store's pump. It pumped a tire up to about 105-110, and started blowing air out the same way. Poor sales guy even broke off a presta stem on a floor bike in the process.

Anyway, he went into the nether regions of the store, to try to create a better seal on the barrel. Meanwhile, I poked around at the shoes (I'm in the market for a pair of road shoes). A few minutes later he emerges, and what does he lay in the snot-stained glove on my hand but a full-packaged brand new $35 Park Tool PFP-3 pump! "Sorry, we couldn't fix it, just take this one," he says. Thing is, Roger, the owner, owns another store a coupla miles away. I offered to cruise over there and pick up some $20-ish pump instead, but he insisted I take the Park pump. Dang, that is customer service!

'Course, Roger doesn't encourage that kind of service just because he's a nice guy (which he is, BTW). He knows it pays off. Yeah, I'd burned 20 minutes of prime road-riding daylight dealing with that pump, but I still got 30-ish miles in. On the way home (actually, going a coupla miles out of my way), I stopped in at his other store to do some more shoe shopping. There's a pair of Sidis going on sale next week I'm seriously thinking about now.