Epiphany

As part of being every trigeeks bitch for the past few days, I got to see a lot of bikes from a lot of different places. The post a few back with the track ends bent to shit is a fine example and will help you all understand the point of this post.

This Orbea Ordu with full Di2 was shipped to us in a hard case from a shop in PA, if I remember right. When I pulled it out of the box the track end was severely damaged and needed some bending back (luckily it wasn't crabon). The Ordu was one of two bikes that were boxed and shipped from the same shop. Unfortunately, the Ordu was in the best shape.

I didn't take pictures of the second bike because it would have been super hard to tell what I was trying to show through pictures. The bike showed up with Zipp wheels with an aluminum braking surface but had crabon brake pads. Not a huge deal but the pads had worn down so far that the wing on the bottom of the brake shoe had begun to wear into the crabon just below the braking surface. The braking surface was so worn it was concave and had begun to separate from the rest of the wheel. To top all of this off, the bike came with 10 speed bar end shifters and a 9 speed cassette.

Now I wouldn't have been too surprised for a bike to show up in this condition, it happens all the time. What I was surprised at is the fact that when I called the guy to give him the bad news he informed me, with the use of expletives, that the shop that it came from was supposed to have checked everything before boxing. These are some pretty hard things to miss.

The first thing every descent wrench does when a bike is in their stand is to check the gears, more out of habit than any other reason. With the first shift it was obvious something was wrong. It would have taken no more than 10 minutes to determine that this bike was no good and to delve in with a bit more detail and find the pads.

The more bikes that get shipped to our shop, the more convinced I am that most shops pretty much suck. With this realization comes the obvious backlash, if most other shops suck then that is probably why a lot of customers don't trust us...

I might have to start being less cynical.

Out.