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| - The real measure of a great business isn't how they treat happy customers, it's how they treat customers who have an issue. The employees of this business are nice, cool and helpful, but sadly they are led by an owner who does not understand how to treat customers.
A group of friends and I flew to PHX for a four-day ride on the Arizona Trail. We were hoping for good local advice and for good rental bikes that were equipped to handle the trail. We got the opposite. We were advised that we did not need slime in our inner tubes, which ended up costing us our first trail day. Collectively we had 12 flats in our first hour on the trail because (as we quickly learned) the AZ trail is full of sharp hazards and slime is absolutely necessary to avoid flats. We had to abandon our first day and catch a ride into Tucson to buy slime tubes. Take my advice, not theirs - if you're riding the AZ trail, buy several slime tubes or your trip will be ruined.
Another issue is that two of the rental bikes from Cactus had split tire sidewalls. To send a bike out like that is amateur. Unfortunately, by the time we discovered this, we were about two hours from Cactus and ready to embark on the trail, so we booted one tire and changed the other to a brand new tire we had purchased (and which they now have on their rental bike courtesy of us).
After the trip, I called the manager about these issues and she immediately got defensive and turned everything back on me. She said it was my fault that we listened to her employee's advice about the slime. And she straight up said I couldn't be telling the truth about the split sidewalls, because her shop would never make a mistake like sending out a bike like that.
I think this shop must not have much nearby competition, or maybe she just doesn't care about my business because I'm from out of town. I got off the phone feeling beat up, and I'm the customer (who spent hundreds in her store). I don't think it's unreasonable to count on a bike shop for good local biking advice, and to count on that bike shop for a rental product that's checked out and ready to ride. But it's not even those issues that are most galling. Everyone makes mistakes - that's just human. But my treatment on the back end was terrible and prompted this review.
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