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Buying Phones
December 1st, 2007 at 02:00
I bought a new phone today, because my old phone is barely functional. It turns out that buying a phone is approximately infinite hassle. I knew what I wanted: a Nokia N95, and I knew that I didn’t want to get a contract of more than £20 a month, because frankly, that’s too much as it is. I’d seen an offer on the T-Mobile website for exactly this – but I thought I’d go around the mobile phone shops to see if I can get the same deal on O2, the network I’m on at the moment, on the basis that it would probably be less faff. How wrong I was.
Scene 1 – the O2 shop
I made the mistake of approaching the trainee sales person, who’s breath stunk (I wasn’t kissing him, you could smell it from a metre away), and enquiring if they were willing to negotiate on contract prices, on the basis that nearly everyone I know has an anecdote about how they bought a phone and got some sort of excellent deal on it after doing some bartering.
“We can’t do stuff like that… blah blah blah… head office… blah blah blah”, says the trainee. I kind of lost interest once I knew he wasn’t going to be very helpful.
Scene 2 – Phones4u
I think mobile phone retail is that sort of intermediary step between being a lowly tillmonkey and swaggering open-necked sales twat. I was hanging around looking at the phones, waiting for one of the sales vultures to try and chat me up, when the manager started talking to me. I explained what I was looking for, the rival deal that I had seen on the internet, and he referred me to the sales guy. “Take a seat”, he said, and I sat down.
It was here I encountered perhaps my first ever first-hand experience of a “hard sell”. It was a very high pressure thing. The salesman got out a contract and started asking me for personal details before he’d so much as asked what I was looking for. He’d even surreptitiously put me down for a bluetooth headset that I didn’t need.
With the details practically filled out, he got out at blank sheet of A4 paper, and began explaining the £45 a month deals to me – and how that if I wanted a cheaper contract I’d have to pay £400 for the phone as well. Despite his writing being near illegible, and the information he was transcribing being nonsensical – just figures that make no sense without context – he persisted in writing stuff down whilst trying to talk me into an expensive contract.
He clearly wasn’t having much success, as I was having none of it – I wasn’t going to budge. His manager could see that he was floundering, so slithered over in his slimey way, and I thought he was going to do that thing they do on Rogue Traders all the time, where the crooked salesman asks his boss for a discount, and the boss grants it as a “one time only special offer”, and the customer is pressured into taking it because its such a “spectacular” deal. This didn’t happen though, because £35/month is out of my budget too. Like I said at the beginning.
It got to the point where, in order to illustrate the fact that I’d apparently either have to compromise on price or handset, the salesman turned the page over, and drew two boxes, putting ticks in them, and then drew a dividing line between them, and held up the piece of paper to really illustrate his point.
It was at this point I decided to leave – but not before he insisted I take his card… and insisted on writing a day and time on which I’d come back to see him to finish the deal.
Scene 3 – The T-Mobile Shop
I walked thirty seconds up the road, into the T-Mobile shop, and got a Nokia N95 for £70, on a £20 a month contract. Job done.
The staff in the shop were generally pleasant and helpful (although it did turn out they delayed running a coverage check on my postcode until after the sale because my town has no 3G coverage). What I didn’t anticipate though was the faff involved in making the sale. There was a credit check, many forms needing to be signed – I even had to go to the bank to find out my account number. I love gadgets, but its enough to drive anyone insane.
What I’ve neglected to mention is that throughout this adventure, my friend Katy was with me – and despite being a woman and practically genetically programmed to enjoy shopping, I thought she was going to kill herself (or me) after the first hour and a half of trying to buy a phone.
I was happy though – I’ve got a rather excellent phone out of it, even if the shopping aspect was intensely irritating.
Scene 4 – Back home
Unfortunately it didn’t end there though. Despite being thoroughly bored of hearing about free minutes and free insurance, I had to ring O2 this evening about transferring my number, where before they would tell me my PAC code (the code used to transfer your number to a different network), they insisted on putting me through to sales, who tried to convince me to stay. A woman spent a good five minutes explaining what deals O2 had, before I explained that I signed an 18 month contract only a few hours previously.
Phone shopping is tedious.
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