Bike Shops - Listen

well yeah the end-loser always asks for the basic tuneup cuz its the cheapest, if he knew all the stuff the bike needs he would probably fix it himself

so now what the shop then needs to do is get the bike in a stand and show  buddy he actualy needs a bunch of other shit as well for a couple of reasons

if the tech can't fix it in 39.95 and the bikes doesnt work that well the endloser will be unsatisfyed and tell his friends

if the tech does it anyway and charges more than quoted endloser will be unsatisfyed and tell his friends

if the tech just sucks it up and only charges 39.95 the shop loses out and the tech is pissed

Posted by: XXX_er

so now what the shop then needs to do is get the bike in a stand and show  buddy he actualy needs a bunch of other shit as well for a couple of reasons

Last shop I worked at we had a mechanics station / stand @ the front door whose main purpose was to asses bikes that came in for service. It added a body and a bit bit of front end time when you booked bikes in but the dollar values on repairs went up, the number of repairs you could do in a day went up (no techs wasting time assessing), the turnaround times went down, the returns went down, on and on... it was great.

Here's an example of a $50 tune-up (having to type it out so to not mention the shop, and their website won't allow me to copy / paste ha ha):

Adjust brakes and gears

Lubricate drivetrain

Quick wipe down of the frame

Safety bolt check of all nuts and bolts

Inspect overall condition of the bike

Test ride

You have to pay for the $100 tune up in order to get the derailleur hanger checked, so the gear adjust is probably a waste of time. You can't properly adjust shifting without ensuring that the hanger is at least reasonably straight.

Adjusting brakes can be a quick job, but can also take forever (stopping first gen Guide R brakes from rubbing for example, or remembering to crack the bleed port on the latest Shimano brakes so you don't blow out the bladder pushing the pistons back.....).

Inspecting the overall condition of the bike should involve providing the customer with the results of these findings, which takes time to write up which isn't factored in to the price. Also for $50 I wonder how detailed the inspection is? I never hear of bike shops measuring rotor thickness for example, and this should be done on all inspections. In general they only have to wear down 0.3mm before they should be replaced. 

I could go on but this subject gets me hot under the collar :D And to be fair (to be fair, to be fair, to be faaaaiiirr), I know the shop I have pointed out do well, and I am just using them as I knew their pricing rather than spending more time surfing the 'net.

This is why I learned to do all of my wrenching at home.  And I buy used equipment, so warranty claims aren't a thing.  I can't remember the last time I actually went into a shop for anything.

I just invest in the proper tools as I go and even lend them out to friends/wrench on their bikes when needed. 

The only thing I can't do is shock rebuilds/damper service, but I use Dirtlabs for that. 

I work with quite a few engineers and they bring their bikes to the shop for everything.  But they make enough money that they can't be bothered doing any wrenching themselves - they would rather just pay someone for it.  Those are the customers that the shops want, they aren't interested in me asking for Fox 20wt Gold, because they know I am doing the labor myself.  I get it and from what I have seen, there are plenty of the desired customers around, especially with eBikes taking off.

Posted by: thaaad

Posted by: XXX_er

so now what the shop then needs to do is get the bike in a stand and show buddy he actualy needs a bunch of other shit as well for a couple of reasons

Last shop I worked at we had a mechanics station / stand @ the front door whose main purpose was to asses bikes that came in for service. It added a body and a bit bit of front end time when you booked bikes in but the dollar values on repairs went up, the number of repairs you could do in a day went up (no techs wasting time assessing), the turnaround times went down, the returns went down, on and on... it was great.

Smart service strategy ^^ eh,

the last time I did a little bit of wrenching somebody warming a seat in front of the cashregister would just fill out the W/O without looking at the bike, I put a bike in the stand fuck around a bit/ try to figure what the work order said/ call the end loser but it was before smart phones so I get the answering M/C or somebodies mom, pissed off I thro the bike back on the pile. It wasnt unusual to do this 5 times in one day , end of day I havent done anything, I am pissed off and there is no way we made money on this cluster fuck

the shop was downtown and some body was taking in bottle-picker bikes, they were so fucking bad, a memorable job was I'm trying to adj the der on an old piece of shit but there was something seriously fucked and then i realized buddy had swapped in a wheel with 5 spd cogs to a bike with a 7 spd shifter ( or the otherway around ) ... WTF eh ?

this  shop now has a stand to do triage,  they make a lot of money  and they don't take in shit bikes

I wrenched in a shop for a year too, and the owner had no clue about what brought in the money.

There was a big factory close by and they had a batch of like 50-60 beater bikes that they'd use to ride around their big yards. They'd throw them away, leave them out in the rain and weld some things back together when they broke. The owner was super happy to get this "contract" and just threw that our way hoping that we would get a lot of money from them.

There was only one 35 year-experience mechanic who could maybe get enough made in a day to make it profitable, but we would bring him the parts and do the billing so he'd only do the wrenching. The rate was 55$ per tune up, which included truing the wheels, adjusting derailleurs, shifters and brakes, checking derailleur hanger alignment, chain use, etc. and all bolts checked. They had a 15-20$ limit of replacement parts to add to each bike, so it was just an unsatisfying shitty job. Luckily I didn't have to do a single one and I honestly didn't mind filling out the service forms or building brand new bikes fresh out of the boxes!

There was also a lot of new old stock parts that nobody would ever buy : discoloured grips that spent their life in the window, basically all MTB tires were all models that nobody would us (Maxxis Ardents and Aspen, some Geax, Nevegals, etc.)... Looking back, I think it was mostly a road shop and that's a good thing as the 10K$ road bike people didn't mind paying for parts and labour.

All in all, I had dreamed my whole younger life that I'd love to work in a bike shop and wrench on bikes, but at 32 years old, stopping my masters half way and resorting to doing this for a living (at 12$/hour!), my dreams fell apart pretty quickly haha! Maybe I didn't end in the best shop in town, but still, it was one of the shittiest jobs I had done.

Posted by: Squint

Probably most people bringing in their bike for a "basic tune up" never wrench on them. I imagine most of us who work at all on our bikes could make a world of difference to half the casual riders on Vancouver streets in 15 minutes: proper tire inflation, actual chain lube (not WD-40), twiddle the rear barrel adjuster so it actually shifts.  But yes doing so in volume as a professional would be soul-sucking. 

It's also kind of a loss leader to get people in the door, get them to trust your shop and upsell them on further repairs and parts if the bike is actually a shit show.

or get them to buy a bike in the future....  I would be hard pressed to turn away any job as long as you are upfront about it.

Called around to find some CX-ray spokes for some new carbon road wheels I'm building up. Figured I'd splurge and get the expensive bladed spokes.

Called one shop - the guy on the phone didn't think they had them. Then when he asked he was told that they kept long ones and cut them down. I thought, great. The spokes are $5.10 each so even though it's only 44 spokes, it comes out to $230. I paid my deposit through interac and they were going to cut them down. I asked them to just double check my math on the spokes before cutting as they are expensive spokes not to be able to return after being cut.

Got an email back saying that the sales person didn't know, but it would be $32 at 50cents a spoke to cut and $15 if I wanted them to double check my calculations.

I figured clearly these people can't do math based on 44 x 0.5 = 32 in their world, so I said fine to the 50 cents and no to the $15 math fee.

I then got another email later that day telling me that they couldn't cut the spokes as they were too long to cut.

So let me get this straight. I can just buy these online but I thought I'd try to support brick and mortar. They want to charge me for their advice on spoke length yet they don't even know what they are doing when it comes to cutting spokes. They said the reason it would be $15 to do the calculations is because they would have to interrupt their mechanic from working on bikes.

I guess I should have demanded to talk to someone who knew something about spokes and wheel building? It's funny, if you know nothing and want to buy something, they will pay someone to talk to you forever to sell it but when I know what I'm doing and my needs are beyond their sales person, they want to charge me for them to talk to me or think about my problem.

Luckily I have a LBS that doesn't do this BS. This is just a bit out of their wheelhouse so I had to go elsewhere. I understand how shops stay in business as their is no shortage of people who have no idea how to fix a bike but talk about throwing away money when they have someone who has bought 4 bikes in the past year come into their store and they turn that person off enough that they never want to come back. The sales person wasn't a jerk or anything, just following "policy" I guess. It just seems like a shit business model.

I know he said he wasn't selling spokes anymore, but have you checked spokeservice.ca / Islandix instruments just in case?  He was great to deal with!

Also, did you ask the shop if they just cut or roll the threads ? I would'nt buy cut threads spokes (especially not CX-rays at that price) since the threads end up much weaker. Maybe they have the thread rolling machine, but I haven't seen that at many shops.

Playing Devils Advocate but next time I need something done at a garage, I'll see if I can get the mechanic to stop working on bill paying jobs and do something for free for 30 minutes, just to make maybe $80 profit on parts? ;)  

For $15 you get piece of mind that the spokes are correct, and if they are not, you have some come-back with the shop. I don't think that's the end of the world is it? I think 30 minutes is a fair estimate to start ERD / hub measuring from scratch, plug the info into whatever one's favourite software is, find spokes, prep the spoke cutter, cut spokes, roll threads, clean up and clean the threads so there is no oil left on them, and write up the work order so everyone is on the same page as to the work done, measurements etc and enable the work to get rung through the POS system. It looks like they wanted to bill for around 30 minutes of labour time for offering a service. 

(Morizumi, Kowa and I think Phil Wood roll threads rather than cutting them)

Oh yes I'd totally pay the 15$ too for them to validate your spoke lengths, making sure that if they're too long or too short you could come back. That's cheap insurance, I often had 1mm off calculations even if I was super meticulous measuring and using many calculators.

Posted by: trumpstinyhands

Playing Devils Advocate but next time I need something done at a garage, I'll see if I can get the mechanic to stop working on bill paying jobs and do something for free for 30 minutes, just to make maybe $80 profit on parts? ;)  

Just to put things in context. If I went in to buy a $500 bike, the sales person wouldn't blink at swapping stems, adjusting the saddle, having the mechanic ensure the bike is safe prior to a test ride, do the same on one or two other bikes, not to mention the labour to assemble the bike in the first place as well as the free "tune ups" the shop provides for life. 

I went in already knowing qhat spoke I wanted. They didn't have the right length but I was informed they would cut them down. I've never been incorrect in my spoke lengths but I figured at $6 a spoke I wouldn't mind someone else running the numbers (which I provided) through the computer to ensure I didn't do something stupid. On a $250 sale that cost them exactly zero sales time, I didn't think it was too much to ask. I've cut spokes, it takes 5 mins. In fact it almost takes longer to write down the steps than to do it. And I didn't want custom cut spokes, it was all they had.

At the end of the day, because they didn't just get the person who knew what they were doing to speak with me for 2 mins, they lost a sale and I'm out an interac service charge. So what part of this was I being the unreasonable customer who expected the world?

A shop makes more money selling 5 x 1000$ bikes than one 5000 $ bike and margins on the 10,000 or 20,000 bikes is even less but they live for this shit, facking with a handful of spokes not so much

anytime I call for any product or a service it becomes apparent pretty quick if I am wasting my time talking to this person so I keep calling and it might take 10 calls to find what i want but I know that I can't demand what isnt there to begin with

I duno if you were unreasonable but maybe it is your job as the consumer to look at the situation and decide to pull the plug on dealing with this shop early on because they aren't really on top of what you wanted ?

Posted by: RAHrider

Just to put things in context. If I went in to buy a $500 bike, the sales person wouldn't blink at swapping stems, adjusting the saddle, having the mechanic ensure the bike is safe prior to a test ride, do the same on one or two other bikes, not to mention the labour to assemble the bike in the first place as well as the free "tune ups" the shop provides for life. 

I went in already knowing qhat spoke I wanted. They didn't have the right length but I was informed they would cut them down. I've never been incorrect in my spoke lengths but I figured at $6 a spoke I wouldn't mind someone else running the numbers (which I provided) through the computer to ensure I didn't do something stupid. On a $250 sale that cost them exactly zero sales time, I didn't think it was too much to ask. I've cut spokes, it takes 5 mins. In fact it almost takes longer to write down the steps than to do it. And I didn't want custom cut spokes, it was all they had.

At the end of the day, because they didn't just get the person who knew what they were doing to speak with me for 2 mins, they lost a sale and I'm out an interac service charge. So what part of this was I being the unreasonable customer who expected the world?

I guess we'll agree to disagree :)

But you do point out some reasons why bikes shops aren't as profitable as people might think. Ask anyone who worked at a now defunct chain of Vancouver bike shops how well 'free tune-ups for life' worked out ;) Or any shop who gets stuck with a bin of 'take-off' stems that never sell due to shooting themselves in the foot by swapping them out and giving the customer a credit for them. 

I'm not sure why a shop would want to type in the numbers that a customer provided to double-check a calculation. It'll bring up the same numbers! The only way to check with any integrity is to start from scratch. Sorry, I've seen too many fucked up wheel calcs and failed wheel builds to trust anyone else's provided figures. 

Different spoke machines take different lengths of time. Phil Wood is pretty fast by all accounts (the only popular one I haven't used ironically). The two stage ones like Morizumi and Kowa take considerably longer. Custom cutting or not, it's the same process. Even distributors like Orange Sport Supply charge to cut spokes if the shop wants a size that they don't have, and that's entirely fair. 

FWIW, we haven't been charging to cut spokes. The problem arises when people assume it takes 5 mins, and get frustrated when they are hanging around while the mechanic drops everything to set up the 2-step machine and go through all the processes I mentioned above. So we end up with a pissed off customer and give away free labour to boot. Yay!!