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One Centimeter or the Art of Being a Mind Reader

By Maynard Hershon

Once upon a time, my friend Judy ordered a bicycle from a fine bike shop. It was her dream bike, a made-to-measure steel frame built just for her by a local builder, assembled with new top-level parts.

The shop took measurements and studied Judy’s position on her old bike. They ordered the frame and parts, including the appropriate bar, stem and saddle, so the new bike would fit her perfectly.

There was no package-price, no “deal.” The bill reflected charges for each item at full price. This part is this much, that part is that much. Assembly is included. Here’s the total...

When she went in to pick it up, it was glistening, lovely, worth every penny.

She’d brought cycling shoes and shorts so she could sit on the bike and clip into the pedals for a last check, to ensure the bike was indeed perfect for her.

When she was in the saddle and clipped into the pedals, the store’s bike-fitter looked long and hard at her position, especially her reach to the bars.

He decided Judy would be better off with a stem one centimeter longer, so her handlebars would be just a bit further from her new bike’s saddle. The setup was one centimeter from perfect — in his view.

As you may know, in the days before threadless steerers and handlebar clamps that unbolt, switching stems was a lot of work. You had to unplug and un-tape one side of the bar. You had to remove the one brake lever and probably undo the tape holding the brake cable to the bar.

You had to loosen the stem binder and remove the stem from the steerer without kinking the brake or shifting cables. You could then loosen the clamp and wiggle the bar out of the stem.

At that point, you could reassemble with a shorter or longer stem, hoping that the one you’d just removed hadn’t become scratched and hard to sell. Lotta work.

With that in mind, the shop guy told Judy he intended to charge her 10 dollars for the stem-swap. The 10 bucks wasn’t payment for the new, longer stem. That, they’d simply exchange. He just wanted to cover the labor.

Judy was stunned. She’d just spent hundreds of dollars for a bike designed and made just for her. The good bike shop had fussed and fretted over small stuff so her bike would fit her perfectly from the first pedal stroke. Somehow it didn’t.

Now they wanted to charge her to make it fit the way they’d assured her it would. Is that fair? She didn’t think so.

I don’t believe Judy said anything to anyone at that time. I know she took her bike back to that shop for post-sale services and re-truing of the wheels, stuff that was part of the deal. But she never spent another dime in the place. It’s been more than 10 years since the day of that bike sale and stem change, when the shop lost her forever.

Let’s look at what happened.

No doubt the guy who suggested the stem change was sincerely looking out for Judy. He must’ve felt strongly that she needed a longer stem, because he wasn’t going to make friends in the repair shop, asking them to partially dismantle a slick new bike they’d just built.

When he told Judy the stem change was not part of what she’d already paid for, he didn’t ask her if the $10 charge was going to spoil an otherwise fine bike-buying experience. If he did ask, Judy must’ve brushed off the question, not wanting to sound cheap or overly demanding.

By the way, some shops today (in the age of production pro-bikes) not only charge for labor to change the factory stem, they sell you the new stem and hand you the original one. Hey, it’s not new anymore. YOU keep it.

My feeling is that the shop that sold Judy her bike had a right to charge her for that stem-change. It’s not assembly labor, it’s RE-assembly labor. They didn’t try to charge her for the new part, only for the time it took to install it.

Bike fitting, despite all the technically advanced systems available to shops, is not an exact science. You can design and build up a bike as painstakingly as you have time to do. Still, when the customer sits on the bike for the first time, you often see where you might have done things differently.

You might see that someone like Judy needed a slightly longer stem.

But the salesperson should’ve asked Judy (or tried to sense) if that $10 charge seemed unreasonable or insulting. Evidently he didn’t. He figured she’d understand that the store had to pay someone to do the work. He hoped she’d gracefully accept the extra charge.

On her part, she didn’t speak up, telling him it did indeed seem unfair. She just went away — permanently.

Because the salesperson tried so hard to do a perfect job, he unwittingly cost the store a previously loyal, happy, high-end customer. Had the guy never said he felt the bike needed a stem change, Judy surely would’ve ridden contentedly off into the sunset on her new bike.

And bought a few others from the same store since then.

What would you tell that guy?

Would you tell him to keep his mouth shut about last-minute changes, even if he believes they’ll be beneficial? Would you tell him never to ask for payment for unforeseen changes — even if the repair guys will resent his giving away their labor?

Would you tell him that he should be more attuned to his customers’ responses? How attuned is attuned enough?

The salesperson has to be super knowledgeable about all aspects of cycling, about metallurgy and musculature and marketing and manufacturers’ suggested retail prices. He has to deal with all kinds of people, sincere shoppers and utter time-wasters. He has to keep the Oakley cases dust-free.

And he has to read minds. All for $8 an hour. Sound good to you? Me neither.

Maynard has been writing about cycling for the Bicycle Paper (and the Rivendell Reader) almost forever. He says he’ll keep doing it as long as he can get away with it. “I do it for the money,” the Denver-dweller says, but we think there must be something about cycling that interests him.