Another reason NOT to buy a Wal Mart bike..

[Beane]

.... but I also live in a large city where I have plenty of options.

I think this is the key. Often Wal-Marts ( aka Mall Warts) are in rural/suburban areas where running errands could require lots of relatively long drives to multiple small shops.. people like to get all their junk in one place. (obviously this is in addition to generally finding lower prices at MW rather than at smaller locally owned shops).

[Eden]

I think this is the key. Often Wal-Marts ( aka Mall Warts) are in rural/suburban areas where running errands could require lots of relatively long drives to multiple small shops.. people like to get all their junk in one place. (obviously this is in addition to generally finding lower prices at MW rather than at smaller locally owned shops).

It's almost funny -I can walk to most of the shops I need to in my neighborhood, but I would actually have to drive a relatively far distance to get to a Wal-Mart here... I just realized that there are none in the Seattle city limits and I live pretty much smack in the middle of the city.

What a Wal-Mart can do to a small town is pretty depressing. Sure in the short run there's all this cheap stuff, but in the long run it can ruin a small town's business district and disrupt the economy pretty badly. They even use ugly tactics to keep from paying all of the property and other business taxes that they use as bait to get into some of those small communities. (like moving the whole store to just outside the city limits right before the tax breaks they were given are over)

To bring this a tiny bit more back to the original topic - they aren't the only ones guilty of poor bike assembly. Someone over at the other forum posted an actual photo from one of those online (or maybe E-bay?) bike shops selling cheap bikes. It was a road bike and it too had the fork installed backwards.