mountainloz":2ac5r7q7 said:
seriously everyone... quit it! bunch of narrow minded @#*%
getting tired of this attitude to halfords
you can see from my shop history that i've possibly forgotten more than you know, i've been building custom spec bikes since back when all the fancy retro gear was fresh off the delivery,
the name halfords has nothing to do with the knowledge of the people in the building
i would happily have any of my team do any work on any of my bikes.
There are some good Halfords cycle mechanics and some not so good, just as in any bike shops, but sometimes you do get an employee who knows nothing about bikes as they've been drafted in from another department.
I know a few Halfords employees/ex employees from different stores and from what I'm told about the way things are run by Halfords it doesn't surprise me as to the general attitude towards Halfords from the cycling community.
There plenty of tales of problems with bikes bought at Halfords due to badly trained staff or staff who do not have the time to do the job properly, not always the fault of the employee, again it's Halfords giving themsleves a bad name through bad service.
But you hardly ever hear of all the times something goes right at any bike shop, it's rare to see anyone posting about how good a shop may be, people like to complain and rant
Halfords do themselves no favours at all, especially when they advertise the low end stuff all over the TV and papers. Any mechanic who has worked on low end bikes from any retailer knows just how bad they are.
Their ideas of how long a bike should take to PDI are a laugh, the prices for fitting parts are shocking. There are no set prices for a lot of the bikes, the prices always fluctuate wildly, quite often inflated for a month to then be in the sales showing a massive discount over the inflated price making the product look like a right bargain when in reality it isn't (A lot of retailers in lots of trades do this and it is perfectly legal)
If you were able to build a good team around yourself then that is good for all your customers in your branch, but generally speaking a lot of branches are not staffed by the most knowledgeable mechanics & sales people
There are good Halfords and bad ones, like with any shops as I mentioned earlier.
If you admit to working for Halfords on a cycling forum you do need a thick skin as the majority of cyclists loathe Halfords.
If this was a computer forum PC World would get the same sort of response as Halfords do on cycling forums.
