Originally Posted by
Industrial
This is the problem: everything you buy at walmart is designed to maximize profit. <--period!
Dedicated bicycle companies(Trek, Specialized, Giant, Cannondale and especially the smaller ones) primarily design their bicycles to be ridden. Profit is usually an important secondary consideration. These dedicated companies exist solely on their reputation for excellent products. There is a huge difference here. This is a trend you will see in every single product you can think of to some degree. Dedicated vacuum cleaner companies(Miele, Sebo) design their vacuums to work well, be reliable and user friendly. The current corporate trend is to buy the reputation of these smaller companies when they are in trouble and attach this name to a product designed to maximize profit. Schwinn was once a great American bicycle company that built quite a reputation selling quality products. They floundered, got bought out and their name is now *****d out to big-box stores. All the "brand" names you see in Wal-Mart pretty much followed this pattern.
Just from personal experience, I've had vacuum cleaners that only last 1 year(plastic gears in the motor!!!) to coffee grinders that grind coffee but are a nightmare to clean(serious design issues) to bicycles that self-destruct in 100 miles(drop outs breaking, derailers going into the wheel, cranks going lopsided). Blenders that stop working after a month... Humidifiers that work sporadically... I was quite the sucker for a long time.
Enough is enough! I will never buy anything with moving parts from Wal-Mart. I try not to support this corporation that burned me time and time again with badly designed products. I highly suggest you do the same. Walmart bikes are designed to maximize profit. Think about it.
Well do you have a suggestion for someone with my budget then?
I guess like all products, I ask myself whether I'm better off with the cheap product, or none at all until I can afford the more expensive. Coffee makers - eh, we drink coffee but not enough to really care... we use a $20 Mr. Coffee that we've had since college (~8 years). It isn't programmable, it can't really do anything other than brew coffee, but it hasn't burned down our house and it still works. I'm fine with that. The airplane is actually a great example, because I took flying lessons a few times and actually would LOVE to get my license and own a plane. But it's nowhere near in my budget now, so I've given up on it - at least for a looong looong time. I'm not going to buy some homemade paper mache airplane just so I can have a plane ha ha. With the bike, I figure $124 is not that huge of an investment, and if it gets me to work and back and around the park with the kids, and teaches me about bikes and what I like/don't like, for a year or two, then I'm happy. My other option is to shelve the idea of biking for a couple of years until I can afford a more expensive bike.
If a bunch of people on here tell me that this bike is really dangerous (assembly aside - I will DEFINITELY take the suggestion of having that checked before riding it!) and I'm better off not riding a bike at all, then I might very well decide to wait. I will look for the threads about the people who had bad wrecks on Walmart bikes, to see if it was because they were Walmart bikes (by the way, my dad had a really bad wreck on a very expensive bike!) and if there's anything else I can learn from them.
Safety is definitely a concern for me, but I also want to make sure that it's really an issue. For example, I'm a car seat snob. My kids have top of the line car seats, the most expensive ones on the market, which I did a ridiculous amount of research on. I LOVE them. But I can't honestly tell someone that their kid won't be safe in a Walmart carseat - those things are VERY strictly regulated and pretty much are all equally safe. It's just some are more comfortable, pretty, etc. than others. So even though I'm a big fan of my carseat and will preach its virtues to anyone who will listen, I will concede that a cheaper
new car seat (even one from Walmart) is fine safety wise.