I used to go to Rowletts on Broad St. I work retail son I know how it gets at times but the service I've gotten has been unacceptable. I buy cheap stuff that I don't want to pay shipping on there only (tubes, cheap tires, lube).

Hey, I'm not saying they are all perfect--i went through 3 shops before i found one I liked. The key is to develop a personal relationship w/ someone at a shop you like.

Around here though its an issue of both transportation (cheap collge student) and shops that stock anything track related.

Over and beyond helping a place of business because we ride and they sell bike stuff. How about them helping us instead of us helping them. Its all screwed up. I dont have a kissing relationship with my auto shop,JC Penny's or the outback. I go in,get what i need if they have it and leave. Guess its different back east.

Let me throw this out there since there's so many bike shop owners and employees here: My experience in my town with many bike shops and wrenches has been very, very poor - sticker prices waaaay higher than retail (in Mtl it's relatively standard to be higher than msrp, but I'm talking $550 for a $300 msrp fork), $75/hr mechanic work done by 14 year olds who will work for the summer for $7.25/hr, and done wrong, damaging parts with you paying the bill. Not all shops I'm saying, but many I've been to and dealt with.

Standard horror story, blablabla.

In the last year and change, except for a handful of small stuff, a mtb fork that was an insane deal way beyond 'net prices, and a trainer, I've bought nearly everything online - that might seem like some big ticket stuff, but I've built up two bikes in that time.

And anything I can't do myself, I've paid a good shop to do it - they're the kind of shop that doesn't care about installing online stuff. In this case, this was doing a bunch of quickie stuff on my way to work (sigh, that adds up fast), building wheels, installing headsets - more than $400 in labor last year. And that's not counting the drunken sailor spending that happens at MEC, which I guess we can sort of count as an LBS, since I only get bike stuff there.

The way I see it, mech work is way more profitable than selling parts - I don't know what the shop pays for the Ultegra 9 crank that they sell for $350cdn, but I'm imagining it's not say $70, vs if the head mechanic does the work, and let's say in an ideal world he's paid $25/hr (never in a million years in Mtl, but he's stuck around for a while and is good, so they must treat him right somehow) and the shop charges $75/hr for labor - assuming all of the overhead for fixed costs in the shop are the same, isn't labor the best thing for the shop to sell i.e. no overhead?

Now that I've built a bit of a relationship with this shop, and I know my mech to be good, I get them to do stuff I'd normally do myself anyway, just because I appreciate what a good job they do, and what a soso job I do myself. It seems to me if the thing from them I buy is time, they're getting the best deal from me. When I've bought bmx chinring bolts a couple of times, the 10 minutes it took to find them and the $6.95 I paid for them can't have had the same ratio.

And at $350 for that crank, if that's my only option, I'm just not going to get that crank and make due, scavenge, etc, and the shop's not making a sale, and I'm not paying to have anything done. They have that crank because the same people who buy the Merlins and carbon Specializeds there might just grab it and have it installed on a whim, and telling the people that ride your $5K bikes that you only have Deore and Sora cranks because you do more failure/wear replacement, and semi-enthusiast people replace with the cheapest good stuff most of the time means when they want a Litespeed, they'll go somewhere else probably.

JC Penny's is a national chain. There are also auto repair national chains. I don't know what the outback is.

There aren't any national chains of bike shops that will do service for you. So, unless you want to buy everything online, and do everything yourself, you should probably help keep your LBS in business.

All i have is chains,Performance,Two wheels,one planet,jaxs. I say the lbs should do more to keep my business,not i should do more for them. This is all crazy a$$ backwards.