Imagine shopping for a product that you understand pretty well, but the salesman seems to know less about the product than you do. Would you humor the salesman, or would you point out how wrong he is?

In today’s story, one man is shopping for a bicycle when he encounters a salesman who really doesn’t know as much about bicycles as he pretends to know.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Sales guy wasting my time with lies? OK. Get up that ladder…

I was looking for a bicycle as a birthday gift for my fiance one year.

I had a pretty nice mountain bike that I had gotten a fantastic deal on. It was one of those once in a lifetime eBay scores on a brand that had been bought out by a giant corporation, and I basically got it for 80% off retail.

It was a $2400 model that I got for ~$450.

She tried it, and loved how light it was (24 lbs.), and said she’d join me on the trails if she had a bike like that.

He wanted to get her a bike.

So I went shopping.

There weren’t any small bike stores around us, so I ended up in one of those giant category killer sports box stores.

I had about $500 to spend, and wanted to get the best bang for the buck I could.

I had done a fair amount of research on how different component levels and materials affected the weight (and cost) of a bike. There was a lot of tradeoff trying to get decent components while not adding too much weight.

He found a bike that looked like a good option.

I spotted one that seemed to have a good balance of features to weight, but it was way up high on one of those two story bike towers the big stores have.

It took forever to find an employee to ask about it. I finally found one, and asked the sales guy how much the bike weighed.

He said. “About 10 pounds or so.”

I knew at that point anything he said was going to be BS. A 10 pound road bike could be upwards of $10,000 or more.

He didn’t believe anything the guy said.

I told him I doubted it was 10 pounds.

But he said super confidently that he knew a lot about the bikes.

Thinking he had a sale, he started slinging a lot of buzzwords and half made up lingo at me in a kind of condescending tone.

I was pretty ticked at the time I already wasted looking for help, and the clear lies I was now being fed. I figured I’d play along.

He pretended to be really interested.

So, I kept asking dumb questions about components and performance, and he kept throwing bogus info at me.

So, I figured it was time to get the bike on the ground.

I told him I was really interested, and asked if could he get it down off the rack.

This took a lot of effort.

It meant getting one of those giant rolling ladders, maneuvering it between the tall racks without hooking it on the other bikes.

It was kind of a feat to for him to get up there, and a struggle to free it from the rack as it was easy to get it tangled on the other bikes’ handlebars, cables, and components.

It took him about ten minutes of finagling, and he had to get back down to move the ladder twice.

He was pretty sweaty by the time he got down to the floor with the bike. It was pretty obvious that the “10 pound bike” weighed a lot more than he said it did.

It wasn’t 10 pounds.

I looked it over, acting all interested, and went to lift it to feel the weight.

It was probably close to 30 pounds.

I told him I was interested in another one up in the rack to compare, so back up he went.

He didn’t end up buying a bike.

We repeated this two more times, and when I had three bikes in front of me I told him, Nah, I’m just not interested in any of them because they were definitely not anywhere close to 10 pounds.

I thanked him for his time and “expertise”, and left a very rumpled and sweaty salesman with the task to now carry those bikes back up to stow them away.

That was a lot of wasted time, but it sounds like he was pretty satisfied with annoying the salesman.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Surely, the salesman realized the customer would notice the difference in weight.

This person agrees that the salesman was pretty stupid.

Apparently, there are stupid guitar salesmen too.

Here’s how one person got revenge on a stupid car salesman.

If you’re going to sell something, you better know what you’re talking about!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.