So I was contacted by Performance Bicycle and they said, “Hey RL, you’re a cool guy, can we give you a $25 gift card to use at any one of our stores and tell us what you think?” I said, “Um…sure!”
After one of our weekend rides, Priscilla and I drove down to the Performance in the Tustin Market Place.
Upon walking in, we were greeted by a friendly sales rep who offered to help us. Since we were just looking around, we declined his help and moseyed around the shop and eventually I found the tubes. Priscilla has habit of going through a tube on almost every ride.
If you didn’t know Performance is a full fledged bike shop that carries a ton of inventory. From socks to carbon bikes, they’ve got a great selection. One of the things I like at Performance is their in-house product line called Forte. This is an affordable alternative to name brand parts and accessories.
My favorite part of the store was the clearance area. I found these Fox shirts for $5 each! So I bought 2 of them!
After picking up a few tubes, 2 shirts, Power Bar Protein Bites, it was time to pay. The helpful clerk was cheerful and courteous. While I was standing in line, the guy next to me started asking me about my bike, the KHS XCT 556. We chatted a bit about the bike.
I spent less than 30 minutes in the store and my experiences was very pleasant. The staff was great, large inventory of products and the prices of the items I bought were pretty good! So if you’ve got a Performance Bicycles near you, make sure you check them out. If not, you can go to their website and order your goods there.
That’s very different than my Performance experiences lately, to say the least…
I’ve never worked in a bike shop, but I knew more about both bikes in general and what was available on the Performance website(!?) than either of the clowns who “helped” me in my local Performance store a couple weeks ago. I heard them give some pretty bad/inaccurate advice to some other potential riders as well.
I ended up ordering an item off the website with the ship-to-store option, and that wasn’t fantastic either – I had to check in to find out the status every step of the way, with no automatic emails about it shipping, arriving, etc. (you know, like every other site does?).
Some of their stuff is good (that’s why I bothered buying from them in the first place), but man I have experienced waaaay better in the customer service department.