Originally Posted by unterhausen

From what I have heard, trained bike mechanics have a hard time at walmart because they don't want you to do a good job if it takes any more time. I think they are on piece wages too, so I'm not sure why they would care much about how long you take. I have assembled a walmart bike for a friend and it was not a good experience. It needed a lot more work than I was prepared to do. I didn't have a truing stand at the time, for example.

I have seen walmart suspension forks on backwards, so it doesn't really help. I think the cpsc should require the stems be on the right side, I really don't think it makes the boxes significantly smaller to be shipped with the fork backwards. Even if it did cost them a few pennies more in shipping, they have demonstrated they can't do it right.

My lbs is an outlier on how much they work over a new bike. It takes a couple of hours if everything goes right, which is not always the case. But customers don't get a bike with undiscovered problems. This is true even with $250 kids bikes. To compare with a walmart style assembly is a joke.