What to expect at the LBS?

[Irulan]

I don't think it's a hijack. These kinds of comments are important. I recently took a friend mtb shopping. Her budget was 2K-$2.5 K so she wanted a pretty nice bike. She had been to her go-to shop, but I wanted to take her to some of the shops that I support. The bottom line is this. "My" shop ( or one of them, we never made it to the second one) took the time to put her on the trainer with bike and do a fitting for the test ride.. Saddle height, fore/aft, and a cockpit length test for each bike she test rode. They wrote down the settings after the first one so they could quickly set up the subsequent ones. She ended up buying bike #2, which was $150 more than a bike she liked at "her" shop. She said to me that it was worth $150 to her to have the time they took in fitting her before the test ride. No other shop had done that for her. OF course they did a full fitting, including setting the brakes once she had purchased the bike, at no additional charge