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@crank
Trade on those spokes will be less than 50% of retail, same with the hubs and rims.
Workshop labour can run from £25-60 an hour.
Wheel and bike builds are great for shops, because they get to charge the retail markup + labour - maybe 70% of the wheel price is going to them. I don't begrudge the shops this, because even with this markup, many excellent shops struggle to survive.
What I do have a problem with, is the attitude of the shop management. The mech would have to be very special to be getting more than £7ph, even though the shop can be charging up to 10x this for his/her labour. I don't see how anyone can carry on working in a shop, knowing that this is happening to them. Managers who are extracting 90% of my labour can fuck right off.
The other side is the fleecing of the customer.. if [shopx] are making £100+ on a wheelbuild, then they don't need to be charging for AIR!
Seems like they reap what they sow in both cases.. they end up with mechanics who are so green or demotivated that they use a [pneumatic drill/sledgehammer/toothbrush] as a crank extractor. And customers who have had their cranks [drilled/hammered/brushed] off, or have been charged 50p for air, are very unlikely to come back and happily pay you for wheels. (As we see here.. I doubt that we'd be working out exactly how much profit the shop were making, and joking about directly undercutting them, if they had a good rep with our community.)