Bike shops here don't really take me seriously as a customer
Long story short- I have mobility issues, and a non-profit working with us on housing has stepped up to help with transportation in my situation as well since our car isn't just too expensive for us to keep running, but also having issues with stalling out and with worn out rotors and brakes, so we want to keep its use to a minimum until I can get back into my career. We are Denver Urban Gardeners, and have kids in school (luckily the garden is at the school), and have a need to be going there daily to water the garden, and when school is in session, get the kids to and from school.
Conveniently, we live in an area very accessible to the bike path system, so thinking on it, we collectively figured the best way to do that would be to get a cargo bike. Having mobility issues though with a tumor on my femur that I can't get removed, I need something power assisted. The non-profit can financially assist for $1500, so it's not like "buy a new car" territory (not that I want that anyways, my soul is tired of driving in Denver), but definitely within "take the brunt of the pain" of the cost of getting an e-bike with safety rails for the kids.
This worked out for us alongside being approved for the Denver bike voucher a couple / few weeks ago (It's hard to keep track timewise, housing has been a nightmare). Together this would put us at coming out of pocket a couple hundred bucks for the bike with rails. I can sell some stuff to swing that, cool!
Before I was approved for the voucher though, we were in and out of bike shops trying the entry level long tail cargo bikes that would fit our need, and of all the shops that sold cheaper e-bikes and were close enough to be accessible, eBikesUSA and Wheat Ridge Cyclery were the shops on Denver's approved vendors list that had what we were looking for.
Unfortunately, with a few weeks of trying to get things going between the two shops, the salespeople we (myself and the nonprofit) have been communicating with just don't seem to have an incentive to work with us, and I felt it was pretty obvious why that is when we got dropped like a hot potato for some guy who gravitated to a far nicer bike than we could afford. I get it, they just don't make as much money off people like me, so it makes sense that their time might be better placed elsewhere, it just sucks that half of my time that I'm eligible to get a bike with the Denver voucher (which is required for me to even have a bike at all, even with the help of the nonprofit) has been eaten up with "oh we'll get back to you"s that don't get back to me or "just waiting on owner to renew this outdated tax document" that doesn't get filled out. If I had thousands of dollars of cash on hand to just drop at a given moment, this wouldn't be a problem.
It's crushing to think that this may be what prevents me from getting a bike, is just being too poor as someone who can only buy the lowest tier on offer who has to watch her budget.
At the same time, this feels like such a first world problem, trying to get access to a first world technology to solve another first world problem of gas cost x vehicle parts cost to travel as far as we have to in the states in lieu of public transport that I feel bad complaining, but perhaps I'm just stressed from it all.
ETA: I'm not trying to bad mouth the shops. This is just the way things are for the industry as a whole, as far as I can tell from the cycling content creators I've seen talking about how things are going in the industry, and I can't say I blame the shops with how expensive literally everything has gotten.