With regards to the previous comment that department store bikes of 20 years ago are superior to what is offered today, I would generally agree with this, but I would take it back another decade.
30 years ago, department store bikes were typically no frills, bare bones machines that worked quite well, and with a bit of routine maintenance, would serve their owners well for many years.
To draw from another previously mentioned analogy, they were the model T of bicycles. No more or less than what one needed.
Where it all went off the rails is when they tried to offer cheap, poorly engineered copies of high end machines with suspension, indexed shifting, and all the bells and whistles.
The bikes I had 30 years ago came from a big box store. They had steel frames, horizontal dropouts, friction shifting, and worked very well. I would probably still have them if they had not been stolen.
Bikes like that could still be made very inexpensively today, and would serve their users well,but they would be a hard sell, because they just ain't cool.