A dishonest LBS owner...
...told my wife's friend that her vintage Schwinn was too old to be repaired! And that she should give it to him!
The full story: my wife hosted one of those home parties for a friend selling ready-made gourmet food kits, and so there were a lot of women around our place for food tasting, and I was conscripted into service to help set up, open doors, etc. Otherwise I would never have heard this story.
One of the guests was an dear old friend of my wife's whom we haven't seen in awhile. In the conversation "what's new" inevitably led to my new hobby of refurbishing older bikes. She then told me this story: her husband had persuaded her they should both have new his-and-her bicycles to celebrate their 50th birthdays. Their new neighbor owns a LBS that he opened only a couple of years ago. He was behind the idea of the new bikes.
But my wife's friend resisted her husband's argument, because he wanted her to get rid of her old bike, and she "just couldn't" get rid of it. "I bought that bike myself with money saved from my fifty-cents-an-hour babysitting job when I was twelve years old," she said, "and I just can't let go of it."
It's been hanging in the garage for twenty years, and she only knows that it is a coppertone Schwinn three-speed bought in 1970, and "something" is wrong with it. She asked the kindly neighbor who owns the LBS and wants to sell them new $300 bikes if he could fix it, and he told her "No, it's too old to fix," and furthermore, he should give it to him.
Unsatisfied, she went to the local high-end bike shop that caters to triathletes, and that owner told her NO, we can't fix your bike. But he gave her the name of a place that would, but the address "was way out in Timbuktu,", she told me, so she wasn't going there.
Barely able to contain my righteous wrath at these LBS owners, I set her straight. i said her bike most certainly COULD be repaired, it certainly IS worth keeping, and I would be happy to help her, no charge. And I praised her for her good taste in preferring vintage. She was SO delighted. Just the prospect of having her own bike again was enough to put a big smile on her face.
This is a woman who has raised four children into adults, one with a life-threatening disease, and volunteers all her spare time to church and school. And she is very trusting. To think that someone would try to connive her out of her childhood bike.
Then she told me this neighbor LBS owner once was an employee of a bike shop in a wealthier suburb, where the clientele included players from the local NBA franchise; their clients bought a new bike every year. He figured he easily could run his own shop, and opened one in my town -- and after a year or so, discovered the clientele here is not quite so prosperous. He's dropped his line of expensive bikes and resorted to selling parts on eBay, she said. I told her that's what he intended for her bike -- strip it and flip it.
As for the exclusive LBS owner, he was effectively telling her he didn't need her business. That's fine, but he could have been just a wee bit more helpful.
SO. I am just waiting for her to decide on a convenient time for me to show her how to fix her own bike. And I am so pleased to have saved a bike from an uncertain fate for the one who appreciates it the most.
Last edited by DavidW56; 07-25-09 at 10:12 AM.
Reason: typos