Verizon Wireless

This is my second time in the store. I usually hate going in as I prefer to do everything online. However my husband wanted to see the phone cases. There is a man in there named Garrett. He is excellent. Both times I have come into the store he is always nice and goes above and beyond. He is full of a plethora of information and definitely knows what he is talking about. I don’t only ask him about phones… he seems to know everything about any electronic. From now on anytime I want something for my phone I will come into this store because of Garretts exceptional customer service and bubbly personality.

I used to love this store. I’ve been a satisfied VZW customer for… 10 or 12 years, now, and this has always been where I went for new phones, technical service, and accessories. But the last few times I’ve been in, I’ve left very frustrated. I don’t know if the staff is being deliberately obtuse when they are unable to assist me, or if this is some sort of new corporate strategy to get people to buy more stuff by enraging them.
Last night, I went in to drop one line (to a device that no longer functions — I had been grandfathered into unlimited data on my netbook, but couldn’t get that anymore if I upgraded my device, so I just dropped it) and upgrade my phone. The guy took a look at my account and said I couldn’t drop the line until next September because it was still under contract. Whaaaaaat? That netbook was about 4 years old! Apparently when they offered to shuffle the upgrades around on my account, when I’ve upgraded devices in the past (I had 5 lines, all paid for by me) they neglected to mention that you can’t shuffle *contracts* around, only upgrades. Only… I had lines that were out of contract. So there has to be a way to do this.
The sales guy gave up within about 2 minutes, eyes glazed over and offered to put me on the phone with customer service. I was obviously frustrated, but civil and polite, so it’s not like I was screaming obscenities in this guy’s face. I think he just didn’t want to deal with an issue that wouldn’t get him a commission. It took me almost 40 minutes, standing there in the VZW store talking to a series of people on the phone before someone finally noticed what I’d been telling them, that I had lines out of contract that could be canceled. The most preposterous suggestion along the way was that I should hook up an old phone to the netbook line and just keep that for the next year and a half, because it would «save» me the data charges, never mind that I don’t need another cellphone. So I finally got transferred to the one competent employee in the VZW organization who was able to fix my problem. It took almost an hour, all told.
That kind of runaround and wasted time has characterized my interactions with VZW through this store. At this point, the only thing that’s keeping me with VZW is the fact that I have multiple lines (down to four now) with varying upgrade/​out of contract dates, which makes it complicated to transfer them to another company without paying a mint in early termination fees, and the fact that I get a sweet discount through my employer (a large company completely unrelated to VZW other than that they have a good benefits package that includes a discount on VZW service and retail items). Maybe I just need to find a different store to deal with.