Terrible in-store experience

Review of store visit 7/22/20- Cellular Concepts- Gateway in Wayne, PA

Long complaint- to summarize: sleazy sale tactics, incompetence, self-serving tactics, no listening to what the customer wanted, poorly trained or just outright incompetence, and 3 hours of our lives wasted by Jonathan. Sama saved the day.

I have never had such a horrendous/offensive/and time-wasting experience. We dealt with Jonathan for most of the time. Sama Banya came in at the end, thank goodness, and was very professional and tried to clean up Jonathan’s mess.

My son and I went in with the sole purpose of buying an iPhone 11 and a case for my so . Should be simple, right? Wrong. After waiting @ 30 min to be helped- Jonathan was the only one in the store- we were helped. We actually felt badly for Jonathan, because the couple ahead of us was pretty tough on him. We soon found out why. We initially spent an hour and a half with Jonathan-just trying to buy a phone. That wasn’t enough for him. Jonathan started digging into our phone bill, wondering what plan he could sell us, despite being told that we were fine with our plan, he spent @ 20 min on this. He then began pushing the ATT protection plan on us, after we declined it. We said we were going with Apple Care- he then began telling us how terrible that plan was, and wouldn’t let it go. He even continued to waste our time by googling Apple Care, to try to show us how bad it was. We told him explicitly that we weren’t doing the ATT plan, and we were aware of the Apple Care plan, and asked him to move on. By now, we were done with trying to be polite. He continued to try to push the care plan and coverage for some of the lines, and pushing the ATT  tv package. Again, we declined, saying we just wanted to buy the phone.

Jonathan finally goes into the back and brings out the phone my son was going to purchase. We thought we were finally getting somewhere. He then proceeds to try to up-sell us on accessories,... My son picked out a case and a charging cable. Suddenly, there was also a screen saver at the register. Jonathan said he’d put it on for my son, get the bubbles out,... When my son asked if it came with the phone, Jonathan admitted that it did not, he just assumed my son would want it. Then we spent another few minutes making it clear that we did not want it. Anything that we rejected made Jonathan seemed affronted, confused (bad acting), and even a bit annoyed. 

We’re now at the store for almost an hour and a half- all of our patience and goodwill gone. We finally got to the purchase point- it was at this point that Jonathan told us that my son could not purchase the phone, but had to do the payment plan. We had clearly stated that this was our intent at the beginning- but Jonathan said it wasn’t possible. My son didn’t want to pay the extra money each month. Jonathan was annoyed and frustrated- but all of this could have been settled within the first 15 min of our time in the store if Jonathan hadn’t spent so much time pushing things on us, not listening to us, and clearly trying to make more of a sale for himself. We probably would have gone along with the plan, and just cancelled it after the first bill- but at this point we were so put off by Jonathan’s tactics, that we just wanted to leave. My son told him he wanted to think about it over dinner (trying to be nice and saying we might come back.) Jonathan was grilling my son, and getting on him by questioning why $5 was such a big deal. Each time I tried to clarify, he’d then turn to my son to try and pressure him. He offered to help call customer service in the store for my son to cancel the payment plan. In the next breath, he said for my son to go out and do it in the car. I finally said we’d do it if he’d help me with canceling a prepaid phone line. ( Customer service told me they couldn’t do it over the phone, that I needed to go to a store. Jonathan dismissed it out of hand, saying he couldn’t do it and  to talk to customer service.) Jonathan made it clear he wasn’t going to help me unless we went through with the transaction. He had already swapped the SIM cards out and entered the phone upgrade into the system before we paid anything. 

My son and I left. As soon as we got into the car, my son realized that the SIM card in his phone was wiped out, and he had no service. We had to return to the store, and fix it. Of course, Jonathan was with a customer, and we had to wait again. Finally, Sama Banyan came in to help out. Once he was brought up to speed,he tried to help us. Since Jonathan had switched the SIM cards, there was no restoring the old one. We had to get a new SIM card, which Jonathan wanted us to pay for, but Sama could see how badly things were going, and said he’d credit us for it. Sama then had to go help the customer Jonathan was previously working with, because there seemed to be another problem. When Jonathan came back to us, it was apparent that he had also made changes to our account- showing that we had an iPhone 11, when it was never purchased. Sama had to help him figure out how to do an upgrade reversal. Clearly, Jonathan was not familiar with the process, and it was another painful 15-20 min trying to undo the mess he created. He also continued to “blame us” to Sama, customer service,... saying that for whatever reason, we decided to back out at the last minute; he had done everything but then we canceled,....Jonathan had no sense of awareness that his behavior and lack of knowledge (or training) was what made us back out.

We lost a good 3 hours of our life that day- it was unbelievable. I could go into even more, but this is already long enough. Finally, while waiting for service to be restored to my son’s old phone, I bought an iPhone 11 and the Apple care plan online, and we picked it up the next day- no hassle, and clearly what we should have done in the first place.