Good morning,
I suspect that the reason they are fully booked is that at £30/hour it is a bargain ...... if you want or need to have someone to do the work. :-)
For a retired person with a pension running a "hobby business" that is a decent income but for an LBS that is a
Service To The Customer rate
, they are to be applauded for it, provided that they are not doing it to drive the competition out of business.
My brother worked in an LBS for a while last year. There were lots of reasons why it wasn't going to be making a profit (lots of crazy things going on) but there were certainly examples of suppliers selling them bikes at a retail price of X and then discounting them to less than X on their own websites. There's no way an LBS can make a profit on that - especially when they also have to spend time setting the bike up and doing a free six-week check later.
I get the fact that a McDonalds burger outlet is pretty much guaranteed to succeed whereas being an independent burger outlet is much harder, so selling a brand is at first glance a safe bet, but why are they selling such bikes rather than assembling their own?
At every level except the very, very top an independent can buy all the bits they need to make a bike at the same level as say a Trek or Specialized. Yes, this does require commitment of both capital and time but if the retalier is not making this commitment what does he have to offer other than a lower price? It could be customer service, but is that likely if they have already shown a lack of interest in assembling thier own bikes?
Ribble for example did it for years before deciding to sell up to new owners who are trying to make it a brand, Dolan do fine, as do SPA and SJS so there are bound to be plenty of others.
Once you get into assembling your own bikes not only can you sell the customer exactly what they want, you start to hold in stock items that a customer who already has a bike wants and it becomes harder to compare prices as the specs are not the same.
I like 8 speed yet nowadays pretty much the only way to get a new fully assembled bike would be to buy a bottom of the range machine, yet for many people 8 speed is the tipping point between cost, reliabilty and usefulness.
I'm commuting on a 10 speed and resent the fact that I need a new chain every 8 weeks, given the cost of 10 speed chains and cassettes going mail order is very enticing. Had a local shop offered me what I wanted bikewise then I would have bought the bike and the consumables from them, but as I didn't get what I wanted locally bikewise I see no reason to pay full RRP for consumables from a shop that doesn't stock the bike that I wanted.
Bye
Ian
