When I got my bike(back in May) I went to the 2 local bike shops & talked with them first. Truthfully, the Specialized dealer was extremely unhelpful & only gave me one bike to try. The Giant/Trek dealer was much more helpful in explaining the various types of bikes & letting me try out different models.

I went online and looked at reviews(and found this site) and ended up going with a Giant OCR3, primarily because it was in my price range, but also cause I didn't want to deal with the rude LBS.