Alerted by AdamV, I popped over to Amazon to check out the free (after rebate and with two year service agreement) Motorola RAZR offer. See unlike some women, my TS1 is not excited by the prospect of shopping for shoes, clothes or jewelry but by the prospect of a slimmer, shinier new cell phone. Can’t explain it, I just accept it, happily since a new phone can generally only be had every couple of years.
But it has been two years since we got our matching pair from Sprint and her birthday is coming up. Shopping at Amazon for a complex product attached to a complicated contract is never easy, though. Finding answers for simple questions requires searching for the phone number the retailer refuses to put anywhere on its site and dialing. Fortunately I got a human quickly and he knew the answers:
No, you can’t order two phones on a family plan through Amazon. No, you can’t transfer your existing cell numbers to these phones because they’re pre-authorized before shipment.
Answers on the service plan had to be got from the telco, though, and of course aren’t (easily) found on their website. Cingular at least puts some 800 numbers right on a page labeled Contact. Here’s where we get to the real meat.
The woman I spoke with gave me the answer (sending photos taken by the phone’s camera costs 25 cents a shot but one can buy packs 20 or 40 as a monthly plan) and then switched into sales mode. She could, she said, give me the same price on the phone as the website even though the website says otherwise. Thanks but no thanks, since neither channel will match the ZERO DOLLAR price tag on Amazon.
Uh oh, I must have said something bad. Cingular has exclusive rights to sell these cool phones in the US, Amazon must have gotten them from someone in Europe, maybe Vodaphone. That doesn’t seem likely, I responded, since they’re being sold with Cingular service plans.
Even so, better to spend $200 to get it from her since doing almost anything wrong on the plan from Amazon will either cost me the rebate or a $250 penalty. Even being one day late with a payment would trigger a calamity. Self, I thought, what strange Sales Zone have we wandered into, or is the woman just getting close to the end of a quota period and short on her numbers?
We went around this same track a few times, my dander rising higher each circuit, though the saleswoman didn’t seem to realize it or care. Finally I told I was offended by an out and out attempt to scare me into buying from her, which she insisted was not the case at all. She was only explaining the facts. Then went straight back to the egative pitch.
I finally had enough. I said I don’t do business with companies that treat customers this way, that it’s simply despicable. Instead of Cingular getting one and possibly two new users and making my sweetie very happy, we won’t be considering them at all.
[As an aside I’m wondering where this fits into Dave’s calculus, and if Cingular is more clueful towards the web than Audible.]
BillSaysThis 