Customer is charged a $100 in-store service charge for requiring a Verizon rep to help him

Phone Arena

a day ago

Sometimes, entering a T-Mobile, Verizon , or AT&T store can be like falling through a tunnel that leads you not to Wonderland, but Crazytown. For example, a customer says that he made "the rookie mistake of walking into a Verizon store yesterday because I wanted a phone the same day (should've just clicked a few buttons online)." Thinking that you're going to walk out of a carrier-owned store or an authorized dealer with the exact model that you've been drooling over is a big-time error made by rookie and veteran phone buyers alike. According to the customer, who revealed his story on Reddit, he was approached with the "this is such a fantastic deal" sales pitch. After spending 90 minutes in the store, he was charged $100 for "In-Person Service." The customer/victim asked the Verizon rep for paperwork and was told not to worry, it would be emailed to him (nothing ever arrived). Strangely enough, he was signed up for a business plan that shows the customer and his wife running Verizon LLC!
Verizon charged this customer $100 for In-Store Service. | Image credit-Verizon The customer planned to move the rest of his family to Verizon, but was rushed out of the store once it got busy and was told, "Just do that online." The Verizon rep also said to the customer that, in addition to adding the rest of his family to his plan online at home, he should just finish setting up his account in the same manner.
He wrote, "Now I'm staring at these Business plans that make zero sense—like $100+ for basic unlimited talk/text/data. I don't even know what I'm actually paying per month. Shady salesman swore it'd be '$280 for all six lines when it's all said and done.' Yeah, sure, and I've got beachfront property in Nebraska to sell you."
This just happened yesterday, and a fellow Redditor had a good solution. He suggested that the customer take everything back to the store and cancel all of it. After doing that, he should start over online and request that any in-store pickup be done at a corporate store as opposed to one run by a third-party authorized retailer.
Another response came from a former rep at an authorized retail store who wrote, "I remember the shady shit the third party store wanted me to do as a rep, they are SOOOO hard up for business lines for some reason. They'd tell us to ask about small businesses from every customer and use literally ANYTHING that resembled one as a starting point to enroll them."
A Verizon corporate employee weighed in on the whole story with this comment. "How the business plans work are technically, if [you] receive any untaxed income (like Uber, DoorDash, or even flipping things on Facebook), you qualify for a business account. They're great, if you have 10+ employees. If you don't they make 0 sense. And $100 for in person service is robbery."
But this doesn't totally clear up the mystery of what happened to the customer who was so bewildered by his trip to the store that he called the whole experience "a Cluster &$*k." Most of those commenting on the customer's Reddit post were convinced that the event took place at a third-party store, including one person who works at a Verizon corporate-owned location. The customer himself weighed in on this debate by agreeing that it was, in his words, "a franchise store" since there are no corporate stores closer than 200 miles from his location. This makes a difference because any phone purchased from a Verizon third-party store must be returned to the store it was purchased from.