Oscar the grouch in human form!

I thought I was getting surly, I'm not even close to someone that came in to the shop the other day. Apparently his spawn races BMX bikes.... Yay .... and has a $1000 serious race machine with a stretched chain. Mr. G was not at all impressed by having to spend $10 on his spawns bike and after taking every chain out of it's box and closely examining each link of every chain (all the while mumbling to himself) decided $10 was far too much money for a chain for a $1000 race bike and marched out with the spawn behind. They jumped into a beemer and sped off. All I could think was, poor kid. The look of terror in the spawns eyes when asked a question was heart breaking. If I ever have another spawn it will get any chain it wants.

What the ????

Started out with a bang and it has dropped to the point of why bother. Quickly becoming one of the hoards of surly bike shop owners which I was striving to not become. It has gotten to the point where I had to get a full time job to support the bike shop. And have people making smarmy comments about my hours, such as, "oh, it must be nice to only have to work 2 hours a day" to which I reply " I've been up since 5:30 and have already put in a 9 hour day at my first job, but thank you for supporting small business" Most of the public are not aware but most of us independent bike shop owners do work another job, some even live inside their shops after hours. Why you ask? Because we are bike people, we live, eat and sleep bikes. So please do some research before coming into an actual bike shop and know what it is you are looking for, chances are we already put in a full day somewhere else and could snap at any moment. Thank you for your support.