ppc

I have re-done a LBS job myself once too many today, and I have enough, so I have to vent.

To all LBS owners:

Please stop pretending you work anything but retail, and kindly stop working on bicycles. You're a public danger and a waste of money.

I've lived in many countries on 3 continents and I've never, ever found a bicycle mechanic that can do his work properly. EVER. Either the componentry is wrong, or derailleur cables are used for brake cables, or the bottom bracket isn't tight, or various screws work themselves loose, or pedals installed without copper grease that have rusted solid in the crank, etc etc... the horror list is endless. You so-called bike mechanics couldn't install a pannier rack properly if your life depended on it.

And I'm not talking about my bikes, since it's been a long time I learned to maintain my bikes myself and avoid letting bike shops do it, but also other people's bikes: 2 other guys and I volunteer time to fix bicycles once a week at our local cycling club, and I cannot count the number of people who came saying "well, I got the XYZ shop to do this for me, but somehow it's wrong/doesn't work/stopped working/does it again".

BUT!

at the same time, you charge for the job. And BOY do you ever charge your customers! If bicycles were cars, we cyclists would all be driving Ferraris and Bentleys. Well, more like 50's Fords, given the reliability of bicycles, compared to modern cars. And your "competences" as mechanics certainly don't help solve the problem.

I'll admit that I've seen many nice LBS owners (as well as many ****heads too), and that I had good relationship with those, but the reality is that they were excellent SALESPERSONS, not mechanics. Why do you pretend you can work on bikes when you can't? It's not an age problem either: I've witnesses passable 18 year old would-be mechanics and 65 year old dummies. Never a truly competent one though, nosiree. The only competent mechanics I know are mechanically inclined individuals who one day decided they had enough getting milked like cash cows by LBSes, got themselves all the expensive tools and learned to carry out their maintenance and repairs themselves. Those are the happy bikers who don't have to wait 3 weeks for a botched job, and always have a bike in working order.

To finish with, because this rant has already lasted too long, I realize there must be decent knowledgeable bike mechanics out there. I also know they're not very many, otherwise believe me I'd have met one in all these years of travelling. And anyway, it doesn't take a genius to figure that out: just search on the internet and you'll notice there are very few highly recommended addresses out there in any given country. So if you're one of the rare birds, I'm sorry if the above offends you. If you're not, kindly throw yourself over some bridge and get lost, it'll save unsuspecting customers $30/hr of your useless life.

Up to now, I was all for "supporting local bike shops" as the saying goes, but today I've finally become convinced not a single one of them is worth supporting. A big bunch of thieves is what they all are. It leaves us cyclists with nothing, apart direct-ordering parts and acquiring the skills necessary to mount them.

[/rant]

Dchiefransom

If you can do the work yourself, then why are you relying on an LBS to do it?

ppc

I don't for myself. What got me all worked up earlier is this: my mom went downtown with her bike today. The cheap plastic body of the pedal broke off on the way. Since she was near the LBS, she went there to get new pedals. When she came back home, she told me the new pedals felt funny, so I checked them out and sure enough, one of them was coming unscrewed enough that I could turn the axle with my fingers. The moron LBS didn't even bother making sure the pedals were screwed tight. Either that or he forgot the reverse thread...

I find it outrageous when I see other people's brand new bikes come to the bike shop with non-working brakes, misaligned derailleur, or older bikes with recent repairs so badly done they're already about to fail again. The damn bike shops are so cheap they won't spend the 3 minutes it takes to make sure everything is right. But when my own mother, who doesn't need accidents at her age, and happens to be my only living relative, gets treated LBS-style, I get mad. That dipstick mechanic will get a piece of my mind tomorrow, and he better cough up the money my mom paid today.

I just needed to vent about all the other dipstick LBS I had to deal with ever since I got into biking. Perhaps this was the wrong venue for my rant, I apologize if it was.

Dchiefransom

What money did your Mother have to pay, other than for the cost of the pedals, plus tax? If they didn't slap them on for free, then you've got "credit" for another rant on here.
No, this is a good place to rant. You might have thrown in the bit about it being your Mother, though.
I always recommend the "Stomp" pedals from Performance, or a similar flat pedal. They are alloy, not plastic, and have a bigger contact area for the bottom of the shoe. The other metal pedals just have the front and back "knife edge" for the shoe to push on.

https://www.performancebike.com/shop/...tegory_ID=5240

ppc

She paid about 20 euros. That's the price of the pedals, the installation was "free". In fact, not free at all since the mechanic must be paid one way or the other, so his salary is already included in the price of the parts the LBS sells of course. They will pay her back though, and she'll keep the pedals, I can tell you that, because if they can't do a job right, they shouldn't do it, and if they do it anyway, they need to take responsability when they screw up. What if she had fallen off the bike?


Well, my mom's not exactly a race devil. Any old pedals that grips her shoes do the job for her really. The one she broke was very old and I'm not surprised it failed. I didn't think it would fail so soon though.