T-Mobile

Every time my wife and I come to Houston, something terrible happens to one of our phones. Last time, the dog stepped on my phone and ruined the screen (how does that happen??). This time, my wife lost her phone someplace between Austin and Houston, and we haven’t found it anywhere.
My wife and I, in an effort to simplify our lives and be intentional in our use of technology, decided to downgrade our phones to the most simple, inexpensive plan possible and use our cell phones almost exclusively for emergencies. We currently use T-​Mobile for our smart phones and found that they had good prices for prepaid phones, so we decided to pop into this store and talk to the sales associates to figure out how to get a phone and prepay for some minutes.
Why only one star? The sales associate and assistant manager were the only employees in the store, and they both made us feel like idiots for wanting to downgrade our phones so extensively. No matter how many times we told them what we wanted and had already decided to do, they kept offering to change our current plan and told us that we were making a stupid decision and grossly overpaying for minutes. The manager said, «I don’t even know why we sell these kinds of plans. It’s so dumb to buy these.» This went on for at least 30 minutes, both because we were getting the hard sell, and because the associate we were primarily working with had to walk away several times to ask his manager questions. Other than the high pressure, I don’t know why the experience was so stressful, but it was incredibly unpleasant and frustrating. I’ve had car-​buying experiences that were better (shout out for Carmax).
The worst part: after we convinced them we wanted the prepaid cards, the associate acted really awkward as if we’d offended him. When he tried to ring us up and set up the SIM card, he was slow, but he messed something up and had to totally redo them, so we had to spend another 10 minutes in awkward semi-​silence.
This store is definitely on my list of places never to return!