Reasonable timeframes for bike shop repairs
 

It Depends ...
 

Shorter in the winter , when there is no Service Queue to be put at the tail of..

Q: Do they hire more mechanics in the shop for the busy summer season?

Depending on the nature of the repair and parts needed it could be a week or so. Most LBS only order parts once a week. If it just needs standard parts I would think 4-5 days would be acceptable.

Maybe directly ask the people at the shop for an explanation and a commitment for getting it done. Sorry, that's not as fun as blind anonymous internet guessing.

I don't get a lot of LBS work done, but it has varied considerably. Around here it depends on time of year. Winter is faster.
I've had anywhere from a few days for chain/freewheel/tires to BB chased & faced or wheel true or spoke replaced while I waited.

There's the problem.

?!?!
One conversation; get a commitment from them and promise you'll be there on time for pick-up. Done.

Summer is crazy - spring is hectic.

I try to keep the total time of all the customers waiting shorter, by doing "short/quick" repairs first, even if they didn't come in first - while making sure not to step over any deadlines at the same time.
Plus people with flat tyres are served right away, so they can ride on, not left stranded.

5 work days waiting is quite normal in my city at this time of year. Tasks may be simple, but most shops don't skip the queue - first come, first served.

My deadline policy: :)

​​​​​​​https://bike.bikegremlin.com/4659/ap...servicing/#3.3

On a Popular Bike touring route down the Pacific coast, LBS here does its best
to get those people back on the road
if they need like, 1 spoke , index shifting synch is out & those sort of things ..

if its exotic parts , [Campag is in that category ], It wont be in stock..

but the town has lots of rooms food & drink to fill the wait time..

If I call ahead and make an appointment for simple stuff its almost always same day if not next day. If its really simple I bring coffee and doughnuts and make a social call out of it. For more complex and if they need to order something its probably more like 3-4 days because of waiting for parts.

If I just pop in and drop it off then 2-3 days. I have only used my LBS for repairs a few times when I didn't have the proper tool and didn't want to buy it because of the cost of the tool but I have had really positive experience with my LBS. I have never used them in the winter this is spring/summer/fall repairs. Never more than 4 days that I can ever remember. they usually ask me if I need it quickly for an event or if I can be on the log. If you want to go first you pay 15% more or something.

Reasonable timeframe for repairs? Five minutes to six weeks. Five minutes was last November/December, when I needed help getting a pedal off (time to rebuild the pedal bearings, and it was frozen to the crank). Six weeks was 8-10 years ago, when my bottom bracket wouldn't come out. Soak it in penetrating oil, whack it, try to unscrew it, repeat. (Then two weeks later I went through the same thing with my backup bike!) Both were pretty reasonable.

Glad to hear you're talking to the bike shop. That's how you'll get things ironed out.

From my experience as a mechanic, the shops I've worked for have placed a fairly strong emphasis on scheduling a specific date of completion and communicating that to the customer and completing the work on that date. I have definitely worked a lot of overtime to meet our initial commitments. It was also best practices to ask when the customer would like the bike back--some customers actually no plans to pick up for a long while, and could be scheduled later allowing faster turn around for others. When things have backed up, it was expected to call customers and apologize for running late as soon as original estimates had become unrealistic. In a lot of cases I ended up learning that a number of clients were actually not time sensitive to this repair and I could triage things to make everyone satisfied. Sometimes for very large work orders or when there was genuine reason for uncertainty we would make it clear that we would begin work on a certain date but that it may take longer, and define a reasonable range of expectations. Please do not say "no hurry" and then be surprised when people do not hurry. In your case, if you knew when you needed next to ride the bike, I would've led with that. If you just learned, I'd just talk to them.

As a mechanic you want to both increase the speed of turnaround and to also optimize the amount of billable labor you complete per hour, so sometimes I've adopted a policy of completing work immediately after service writing because it reduces transactional time with the customer, storing and retrieving the bikes, and potentially another mechanic becoming familiar with the bike and the needed work, all of which could literally double the labor time for small repairs. Generally my cutoff for this kind of work is about 30 minutes, and it assumes we have intentionally scheduled our day conservatively and that things are presently going to schedule. Flat repair always on the spot unless the customer wants it otherwise--it's almost always priced as a moneymaker and much of its value as a service is the immediacy. This kind of strategy only works if experienced mechanics are taking in bikes for service writing with the customer, which should be the case the majority of the time in a good shop.

Otherwise, assuming all customers would like their bike back as soon as possible, you really just need to schedule things first come, first serve. Ideally you should schedule conservatively, and in my opinion the average date of completion should be a day before promised to reduce the number of bikes finished after promise to a slim minority, but optimism is a very common mistake and frankly, sometimes things are way harder than you expect. If I had room in the schedule for the day I've always turned work around immediately, but one shop I worked at was at the base of a trailhead, had, in my opinion, low labor rates for the area, did quality (and sometimes over detailed) work, and physically had a small service area. During peak seasons, we were scheduling out a month, and that was simply the reality of things--it was really stressful and made storage difficult.

We have been scheduled out 2 weeks for the past 3 weeks at our shop. This week it will extend out to 3 weeks. Since service is first come, first served, regardless of the nature of the work, a week delay is not unusual at this time of year.

As bikes become more complex the length of time to complete a repair goes up. Another thing I have noticed, which I have not seen since the mountain bike heyday, is how filthy the gravel bikes come in. This dirt requires added time for the repair.

This year we are having trouble finding anyone willing to work for the season as a wrench. Back in the day 30-40 years ago we were turning away 1 or 2 people a day looking for a wrench job. Either they want us to work around their play schedule or they expect a rate of compensation that is outside the ability of the shop to pay. It is so bad that we don't even have high school kids applying. How things have changed.