This afternoon at decathlon lakeside

[Bigtallfatbloke]

..so i went down to poke around...

I picked up some of those silk glove liners and a wind stopper balaclava thingywotsnamejobby.

whaile I was there I saw some of the road bikes they sell...one of which looked ok, then again it should have done for £999. I asked the spotty herbert what was so good about this bike, when I can get a Bianchi for less...he informed me that he had never heard of Bianchi and that this was a better make...erm...'scuse me???

...what pissed me off about those glove things...inside they have a bloddy great label (no wash details or customer benefits just that it is made in china and a bar code)...it makes the gloves uncomfortable...so i cut them out....now I have two holes in my new gloves...peanuts.

the place was packed with essex chavs....and lot's of peeps in the bike section...funny that as there are definately nowhere near as many cyclists on the roads as there are in decathlon.

 

[Paulus]

Perhaps the herbert used to work in Halfrauds?

 

[girofan]

Christmas. BTFB. That's probably why there were so many peeps looking in the bike section!
Bit like Halfrauds, staff are spotty teenagers on the minimum and know naff-all about anything let alone bikes. There just on the sales floor to swipe cards and give you the invoice, then tell you because it's Christmas the bike you order will be on an eight week delivery schedule. But it will be here on time, so not to worry!

 

[snorri]

..so i went down to poke around...

Sounds as if you have had a really nice afternoon out Btfb

 

[bonj2]

can I just say, decathlon is not really comparable to halfrauds. It's like comparing sainsbury's to netto. Halfrauds isn't crap 'cos it's a big chain store, it's crap because it's badly run and doesn't have customer's interests at heart.

 

[Tim Bennet.]

I wouldn't sneer at Decathlon - I've always thought it's a pretty good idea in retail: Their cheap stuff is cheap but workable, and from there on up, the quality is amongst the best you'll find at any given price point. There's every chance their £999 bike will as good as a Bianchi at the same price and certainly better than any Bianchi for less (RRP).

What their bikes will never have is the cachet of a famous name, despite the years they have spent supplying bikes to top Pro Teams. Even the recent brand name change hasn't really helped. It's much the same with Boardman bikes which people damn purely because of their association with Halfords, despite C+ finding their £599 (?) bike was way better than anything else you could get for the money.

Both stores however do suffer from the difficulty of recruiting decent staff for the money their retail concept can afford. However when I was in the Decathlon Lakeside store, it was clear they had brought in a load of staff from France and the amount of training being done was obvious.

But these stores don't have monopoly on muppets in the bike trade. Evans and even places like Wheelbase with their Colnagos and Litespeeds are frequently staffed by kids with very limited depth of knowledge.