My employers are planning on launching a cycle-to-work scheme this spring. I wandered into my most local LBS at the weekend to see what they could do (they are ACT members etc etc). Now this LBS are somewhat oldschool - they make their own frames and I think you need to be a regular customer for at least 10 years or so to achieve any kind of credibility with them.
Anyway, they only deal with Specialized for Cycle-to-Work, which pretty much rules them out for me. However, the point of this post is that they calmly informed me that they are [b]REQUIRED[/b] by the government to add 10% to list prices to "cover admin costs" etc. I find this hard to believe - it sounds to me like they're looking to get a bit of a tax-payer funded boost to their turnover! Anyone come across this elsewhere?
Na, BS - they may have to pay 10% of the agreed sale price to a B2W scheme but that's nothing to do with the government and adding it on to RRP is just taking the p*ss.
Yeah BS. The shop has to pay a 10% admin fee but they are certainly not required by the government to add 10% to list prices.
Load of crap. You should never have to pay anything on top of retail on anything cyclescheme.
Its true that the bike shop loses 10% of the voucher value but this on a retail price usually isnt too much of a problem unless the margin is dire.
On heavily reducded sale bikes (which are obviously sold with heavily reduced margin!) we do have to add on 10% to the cost of the bike as in certain cases doing them on cyclescheme would result in selling the bike at a loss.
If they are asking you to pay 10% on top of the RRP then just walk away. Plenty of places will do a CS bike over the phone and ship it out.
As I thought, thanks for the confirmation.
To be honest, it doesn't greatly surprise me of this particular LBS; most places faced with being 1/4 mile from a site of 1200 engineers about to implement such a scheme would be trying anything possible to get the business...