Some help if you can. I went to purchase a Cervelo this weekend and had an interesting experience that I want some thoughts on. First, here in Colorado I could only find a few stores that carry Cervelo and out of those, none had the Dual which is the bike I want and they said Cervelo is just not really able to keep up with demand. Fair enough. My question is on bike prices. I have purchased new moutain bikes before and my last one was a previous year close out and I was able to “negotiate” a price with the owner of the shop.
How does it work with road / tri bikes? Is the price pretty much the same or do they have room to move? Does Cervelo (or other manufacturers) control it in anyway? One shop said I should consider the Soloist, (which they didn’t have in my size either) and they quoted me a price on a soloist with full Ultegra. I went home and saw a price on the internet from another local shop for about $200 less I don’t want to take away a fair profit but I don’t want to pay extra just because I didn’t know to negotiate.
You get what you pay for. I will argue strongly that a P3 bought from me, Endurosport, Nytro, Mission Bay or one of the other triathlon experienced retailers is much better than a P3 bought at a non-triathlon retailer.
You will then agree with me after you have ridden our P3 for a month.
The fitting/assembly process differentiates one P3 from one dealer fromm another P3 from another dealer. The differences result in tangible benefits such as better perfromance, better mechanical reliability, etc, etc.
Tom, I agree with you 100% and I am not questioning the value at all. I am happy to pay for the expertise and am not trying to just find the “cheapest” deal, but I also don’t want to pay someone an inflated price if all things are equal.
Also, as I said, my selection of shops is somewhat limited here and the shops I am looking at are all listed on Slowtwitch under the vendor section.