Wow. I'm impressed! I just knew as soon as I read this post that a holy shat storm would land. I'm glad it didn't because a department store bike is what I started on! Then I caught the bug, started tooling around with it and now it's not even a shadow of what it used to be. The only parts that are "original" now are the break levers. I wish, with hindsight, that I would've spent a little extra scratch and gotten a nicer bike, but at the time I was new to the whole thing so there really was no other path I would've gone by. So get the dept. store bike, find out if riding suits you because if it turns out you like it on a Huffy you'll be upgrading in no time, and that's the real reason people get a bike

By the way, one major regret I have was not paying attention to the type of hubs and bottom bracket I was getting into, that's where the quality really took a nose dive. Hope that helps!