I was just messing around on Google today, as I was doing a bit of research on recalls. Now obviously, not all 320,000 hits relate to recalls for bicycles sold at Wal-Mart. So I figured I’d check the CPSC website for bike recalls. Of the 841 I found, 59 of them were related to Wal-Mart.
Here’s the problem though. A quick look through recalls for Trek, Giant, Specialized, and any of the other big brands seems to return a lot of recalls where something may fail. The kids bikes, and Wal-Mart bikes in particular, seem to have a list of injuries already sustained by children. There needs to be a warning sign (not the little frame sticker) that says that if you buy your little one a bike from Wal-Mart, the odds are pretty good he or she will get hurt, and not the usual scraped knee. I crashed as a kid, but never because my bike fell apart. This is just so very wrong.
So we purchased a bike for our 4 yr old son this last Christmas from Wal-Mart, not even 2 months later the bearings wouldn’t stay in the thing and the whole pedal flew off and our kid crashed. Luckily he was on flat ground but I could only imagine what would have happened should he of been going down a hill. I am so upset by the whole incident that I am trying to take the bike back to wal-mart and hope they don’t give any grief. I don’t want another bike from them, I just want my money back so I can purchase one elsewhere. Hopefully where someone actually read the directions when they put the thing together.