BLUE LINE BIKE LAB

"[REMOVED MEMBER NAME], As one of the owners of Blue Line Bike Lab it always distresses me when someone has an experience in one of our stores that didn't meet their expectations and will always try to make things right. We do our best to take constructive criticism in stride, learn from our mistakes, and make the appropriate changes to insure that such negative interactions aren't repeated from our end. We always appreciate when our customers come in or calI us to speak to an owner or a manager so that we can handle complaints quickly, efficiently, and personally the way we did before anonymous review sites became so prevalent. I would, however, like to address your specific complaints right here since this is where they are posted. I have to admit that I'm slightly confused when you say that we had a "take it or leave it" attitude once we told you the price of the products and the service that you wanted. I'm assuming, since you mentioned it here, that you brought up the "10% more expensive" than some other unspecified place or places to my staff, who declined to haggle or lower the price for you. For the record, we don't haggle or lower our prices for anyone- our product prices are fair and sustainable, and we routinely audit our competition's service pricing to make sure that we're competitive. In fact, our service prices are some of the lowest in Houston, and I believe that you'd have to travel a great distance to an area with much lower real estate costs to find another bike shop that could beat our service prices. We don't lower our prices for people just because they ask, because that would be unfair to all of our other customer's who paid the regular price and it would also be unfair to me, my staff, and my business that already operate on razor thin profit margins. I apologize if this wasn't communicated to you in an effective manner. I would also like to apologize for the staff member's lack of mountain bike knowledge that you spoke to. I do have two employees working here that don't ride mountain bikes. One of them is Jimmy- he lives at Beltway 8 and Telephone road and doesn't own a car, so it would be very difficult to for him to get a mountain bike to any of our local trails. He does ride his bike more than 30 miles to work and back five days a week, however, so we forgive him for not trail riding. My other employee that doesn't ride mountain bikes is Stephan, who'd love to ride the trails with us but is unable to because of the brutal road training schedule he has to maintain to stay competitive in the Cat 1/Pro category that he races in. All of the rest of us routinely ride mountain bikes, and in fact we have a weekly employee ride called Mountain Bike Monday where we all meet up at the store and caravan the crew to one of our local mountain bike trails. My brother (the other owner) and I have been riding mountain bikes steadily since we got our first "All Terrain" Schwinn's at Walker and Sons back in 1988, and when we originally opened our doors our original concept was to be a mountain bike specialty store tailored specifically to our dirt riding brethren (which quickly proved to be too small a market to remain sustainable). I would ask that if you shop with us again and don't find the employee that you're speaking with to know the specific answers to your questions, to please ask another employee or myself. There are a lot of different categories and styles of bicycles and riding these days, and it's probably close to impossible to know everything about all of them but I'm confident that between all of the various cycling interests amongst our staff that we'll have somebody working that can help you. If there's anything that we can do to improve your satisfaction with our business, please don't hesitate to give either Charles Passe (General Manager) or myself a call at 713-802-1707 and we'll be happy to address your concerns. Fred Zapalac President Blue Line Bike Lab"