Originally Posted by
Wordbiker
Sorry to be the bearer of truth folks. If you keep haggling, the shops will just hire better hagglers, not cyclists that care about finding the right bike for your needs.
Since they do a pretty poor job finding the right bike for my people's needs anyway (as opposed to indoctrinating folks into cycling myths and group think) I think we'd be better off with better hagglers.
Profit margins may be low for the shops, but they're pretty huge for the distributors. If the shops haggled with the distributors a bit more then maybe they could offer lower prices and more products for us customers.
According to Sheldon Brown a typical good quality bike frame costs about $8 to manufacture.