Originally Posted by
softreset
In 5 years working at a shop (part-time / weekends) the amount of people who came in with either a frame set or components wanting the other "half" was 1 out of every 75 or so customers looking at bikes. Not to mention, normally the people who came in wouldn't even buy the stuff from us, because they would buy it online for less. But when it came time to build it or tweak it because they didn't know what they were doing... they lined up like we were giving stuff away.
you said it yourself, people who builds their own bikes would not walk into a bike shop, so of course all the people you see are buying full builds. Also just in general, the prices from Chain Reaction, Merlin, Ribble etc makes buying anything from LBS very hard.