Surprisingly brilliant.

I know Halfords is a bit of a dirty word, and I’ve laid into them myself in the past, for good reason.

I dunno if they’ve changed, or I just got lucky, but I turned up to one of their stores yesterday with my new helmet, some screen shots of some light mounts they sold and lights that may or may not fit them.

Expectations set, very very low I headed towards the back, tried to sneak past the ‘Bike Hut’ desk and it’s always be a Muppet Hole in the past and started offering up mounts, or rather the boxes to my lid.

Dam, I’ve been cornered, Lad is on me like Lynx on a Teenager. “I’m look for a helmet mounted light that will fit this helmet” At first he’s showing me this 30 lumen commuting light, and it took 2 goes for him to understand I wanted off-road light.

For the next 30 mins he opened every box of every product they had in stock to see what would fit, and went around back to retrieve his own Lezyne light to try that one. In the end I settled on a 500 lumen job (it’s only a secondary light to go with my supposedly 10k lumen bar light) and mount for the princely sum of £30 based the best compromise between power / weight / cost. It uses a GoPro style mount which makes life very easy compared to the stupid elastic band job on my bar mount, I might even buy one of their 2000 Lumen ones for my bars.

As always in these circumstances – it totally depends on who you get!

this.

I’ve had brilliant service from Halfords and terrible service.

They are a massive chain with thousands of staff. Some of them will be brilliant some of them will be piss poor

Along the above – true.

I dunno if they’ve changed

they have been improving over the years. Great range of inexpensive but solid looking bikes in there now, but they’ve also got a good range of cheap but decent camping/leisure stuff too.

Which branch, P-Jay? The one by the Tesco on Western?

The Halfords” mechanics” I’ve met have less mechanical knowledge than our 6 year old. My mates turn up before every Xmas for me to check their kids new Halfords specials over. But the staff at our local one are really helpful 😁

Ordered a 18 widgit multitool C/W chain breaker off Ebay for £5 , did collect in store as I drive within 100m every day
Got an email saying your product is ready to collect , great except I am away skiing
Not a problem as 4 days later I got another email saying order cancelled as I hadnt collected ,and money refunded.

My local is pretty good, always helpful especially when I dive in at 4:30 on a Saturday and ask if there’s any chance they could just do _something_ as I’m supposed to be riding tomorrow.
They also know me well enough to price check anything I take to the counter and match the best net price.

Recent experience of Halfords customer service has been spot on, used them for a bike to work scheme and they couldn’t have been more helpful! Yes some of the mechanics are questionable even had to help one mechanic with refitting a another customers rear wheel as he had not seen a nutted rear axle before. He appreciated the hand and was keen to learn so everyone’s a winner as I felt good for helping the lad. With the high street having a down turn due to online business it’s nice to see some companies trying to improve service. I know many lbs’s just complaining about losing trade and not upping there game to compete with the likes of wiggle and CRC and running the same old superiority complex when you buy something other than the components they sell…

Which branch, P-Jay? The one by the Tesco on Western?

That’s the one!