Oh please! I was walking by the bikes in Walmart the other day and noticed some decent looking mountain bikes for $75. I don't want to pay $400 for the same bicycle from some little bike shop just to make sure the brakes get adjusted properly. In your communist scheme, people would would have to pay 2-3 times as much for everything just so a small handful of business owners could make out. SORRY! The marketplace, i.e. consumers, have voted otherwise.
I've only looked idly at bikes at Walmart, but it did appear that there was a range of prices and varying degrees of quality in the bikes displayed. I'm not saying that some are not junk, but the anti-Walmart bias is being manifested, even on Free Republic.
decent looking mountain bikes for $75.
You do get what you pay for.
I dont have a dog in this fight but this is a perfect opportunity to offer a little bit of personal experience. I paid $150 for a 'decent mountain bike' at one of these department stores for my kid, and within 2 weeks the pedal stripped off. Not being a bike expert when I bought it, i had no idea that i should check the pedal so see if it was crossthreaded. It takes a little experience and mechanical dexterity to put it on without crossthreading it. For that profit margin i really dont expect lance armstrong to put it together.
I took it back and got a full refund, took the same money to a custom bike shop and paid an extra 100 bucks for a decent bike that was put together by people who cared about what they were doing.
I've got nothing against walmart, i shop there all the time. There are some things that you dont buy there. Like Sushi. Never buy Sushi at Walmart. (except perhaps in japan)
Who cares? Seriously. I bought my Huffy from a local bike shop for less than 200 back in highschool. They don't charge through the nose.. never did. Walmart just drove the cost of labor down to sell at the price point they wanted. Keep the worker poor so they can sell to people at lower prices.. That's the game. A little opposite of what Henry Ford's ethic was.
There was nothing decent about those bikes for $75. $300 minimum for the most rudimentary, entry level, hard tail mountain bike. That's the absolute minimum for any off-road use. Anything less and your risk of bodily injury goes through the roof. My tires alone cost more than those bikes.
I don't want to pay $400 for the same bicycle from some little bike shop
And you won't. Even the cheapest bikes in the bike shop have vastly superior components and frames than the department/toy store bikes.
What really torques me off are the mountain (looking) bikes sold in department/toy stores with tiny print stickers that read, "Not for off-road use". You have no idea how many idiots we see every month that have hurt themselves seriously on these bicycles attempting to navigate off-road trails.