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Walmart asked not to sell bikes
- Thread starter Sven
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mrg
Riding a '38 Autocycle Deluxe
$40 would have got a Deluxe with all the extras, regular bikes were around $20 and a good used bike was $5
Andrew Gorman
Cruisin' on my Bluebird
SOME things at Harbor Freight are pretty darn good- you should check out the roll away tool boxes. I'm a fan. There is some utter crap, and if I were spinning a wrench for a living most of their stuff would break at an in-opurtune time. But for One job-rolling out some tubing, slapping a coat of paint on the ancestral homestead in redneckistan they enable me to get the job done myself rather than trying to sub it out.
GTs58
I'm the Wiz, and nobody beats me!
I think you're on the wrong forum, this is a bike forum. Here ya go!
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sykerocker
Look Ma, No Hands!
As someone who's neighborhood shop spent most of his summer building and fixing Walmart, etc. bikes, I've got no problem with them selling that junk, er, stuff. In the first place, the truly cheap ones are sold to parents of early grade school kids. Yes, they're dead in a year and a half to two years. Kids don't exactly take care of their toys.
I've discovered that the better Walmart bikes ($250.00 and up) aren't really that bad, given the expected market and price. Adolescents who use them to run around the neighborhood, adults who do leisurely 6-8mph rides around the neighborhood in the evening. They're heavy and primitive (the ubiquitous 7-speed freewheel), but the quality is respectable for the price. The Schwinn's are fairly good, the Next's and Rollfast's are garbage. And compared to some of the stuff I assembled last summer that was bought via Amazon or some other mail order provider, the Walmart product at least has a predictable quality depending on their price.
Besides, if you think Walmart (and Target, and . . . .) bikes are garbage, I wish you could have been around for the last Bike Boom in the early 70's. The stuff that was coming out of department, big box, and auto supply stores made a Walmart Schwinn look like a Colnago by comparison. At Adams Cycle we learned to dread anyone coming in with the Murray, Huffy, Roadmaster or (absolute worst of all) Iverson, asking us to make them work properly, and trying to explain to the customer that the best we could do is remove the Shimano Eagle derailleurs from them, and build a whole new bike around those parts. Iversons were the worst. It was not uncommon to have a would-be customer bring in the three week old Iverson with the steerer tubes sheared from the rest of the frame due to abysmal welding.
I've discovered that the better Walmart bikes ($250.00 and up) aren't really that bad, given the expected market and price. Adolescents who use them to run around the neighborhood, adults who do leisurely 6-8mph rides around the neighborhood in the evening. They're heavy and primitive (the ubiquitous 7-speed freewheel), but the quality is respectable for the price. The Schwinn's are fairly good, the Next's and Rollfast's are garbage. And compared to some of the stuff I assembled last summer that was bought via Amazon or some other mail order provider, the Walmart product at least has a predictable quality depending on their price.
Besides, if you think Walmart (and Target, and . . . .) bikes are garbage, I wish you could have been around for the last Bike Boom in the early 70's. The stuff that was coming out of department, big box, and auto supply stores made a Walmart Schwinn look like a Colnago by comparison. At Adams Cycle we learned to dread anyone coming in with the Murray, Huffy, Roadmaster or (absolute worst of all) Iverson, asking us to make them work properly, and trying to explain to the customer that the best we could do is remove the Shimano Eagle derailleurs from them, and build a whole new bike around those parts. Iversons were the worst. It was not uncommon to have a would-be customer bring in the three week old Iverson with the steerer tubes sheared from the rest of the frame due to abysmal welding.
sykerocker
Look Ma, No Hands!
You and me, both. Fully 10% of the parts I've got sitting on my shelves for outside jobs comes from my local Walmart.
sykerocker
Look Ma, No Hands!
It all depends on what you're willing to pay, and what you're going to use the bike for. Most of the cyclists in my subdivision are adults who'll pull a bike out after supper and go pedal thru the neighborhood for half an hour. Given that they've got no idea where to go and look for a 70's Raleigh Sports (my idea of the perfect bike for this kind of use), and even if they did find one would have absolutely no idea how to put it back in to shape to ride, of course they're looking for a new bike, but, to them, a reasonable price for a bicycle is $200-250.00. And Walmart and Dick's Sporting goods in my neighborhood, have functional decent bikes at that price. The local bicycle shops don't, because they've been sold out of stock all year.
For all the complaining about Walmart, over the past decade their quality on their high end bicycles has come up quite a bit, to the point that it borders the most inexpensive bicycles you might be able to find at your local bicycle shop. A lot of this is due to, from my understanding, that some of Sam Walton's kids and grandkids are quite avid cyclists, and have made a point of having their stores (and especially the mail order side) carrying higher quality bicycles. To the point that you can buy carbon fiber mountain bikes from them now - at well under $1000.00:
- Not sure why it's being titled this, but here's the link to the bike.
TRM
Wore out three sets of tires already!
Superman1984
Cruisin' on my Bluebird
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