Phone Replacement

I am not sure where to send this. I have been on chat 3 times now and got something different eveytime. I want an email address to send a complaint. I recieved an incorrect email. Then something about arbitration. Then this. So here it is.

I recently got an iPhone 7 from the 5012 4th St N, St. Petersburg, FL 33703 AT&T store on Thursday, December 15. It froze up on Saturday, December 17 for four hours. The light would come on but the touch pad would not work in any kind of way. We did a hard reboot several times and followed all the trouble shooting the site had to offer. It finally worked. I am not sure why it didn’t work or why it started to work because the trouble shooting did not seem to help. It froze up a couple more times after. I planned to deal with it after Christmas and when I was mobile from the back surgery I had on Monday, December 19. On Christmas day it froze up again around 1 pm. It hasn’t worked since. Nothing we did would cause it to work. I messaged in a chat session on the AT&T site. They said I had the option of going to the AT&T store (not healed enough to) so that a technician could look at it and swap it out there, call the Apple store, or use my insurance. I refuse to pay the deductible on the insurance considering I didn’t do anything to the phone for it to behave this way. I Googled iPhone 7 issues and this is apparently a complaint by many. That the phone freezes up and you can’t use it. Apparently I had no option to send it to the store or exchange it via mail even though I can’t currently leave the house. My husband took off work for an hour to go to the same store and exchange it. He arrived around 12:30 pm today. He was told by the store manager that he had to go to AT&T and there was nothing they could do for him. This is not how I understand this to work. The insurance wouldn’t cover it because there wasn’t anything we did to it. It was an Apple AT&T issue. Again, not that I think it’s acceptable for us to pay for something we didn’t break. Well, my husband had to drive to our closest Apple store. It is over an hour away. When he got there they told him that was ridiculous what the store manager at the AT&T told him. That they have contracts with all cell phone companies that allows them to exchange the phones in this type of scenario. That is how I understood it as well. Exactly as the employee at the Apple store explained it. I want to know why my husband was told this at the 4th street store. Apple has a long wait time as well. He is still waiting at the Apple store right now. It has been over 4 hours since he left to get the phone replaced. He will have to drive home through rush hour traffic now from Tampa and that will take about 2 hours to drive through. Why did the store manager refuse to replace the phone and cost my husband hours of his life? Again, he took off of work for this. This has cost us time and money. This is beyond frustrating. 

I rarely go to the stores because every time I go we have a bad experience. I have been lied to before by the workers there and it cost me over $200. We were in Vegas in February of this year when we had to go to an AT&T store in order to add my husband to my line and get him a phone through AT&T. He switched over from Sprint to be added. The sales person there was awful. She told me that if we switch to unlimited data and add Direct TV to it that my total bill, with the new phone, would be cheaper than it currently was. She also said it would be one bill. I believed her because I thought as a “valued” customer of AT&T the sales people would be honest. Well, that was not the case. When the bill came it was much higher. Also, the bill for Direct TV was separate. I didn’t even realize how much higher our bill was for a couple of months. Apparently we were late on the Direct TV bill because we expected to be one bill like the AT&T lady told us. We didn’t even get any paperwork on anything. I spent way too long calling Direct TV trying to cancel. We are now stuck with Direct TV but at least they apologized on their side and tried to help lower the bill. My husband and I do not watch cable at all. We don’t need it. We literally took the special because the lady lied and told us the bill would be even cheaper than the current. The entire combined 1 bill. 

I am not happy with the service we receive at the store locations. I want to know why the store manager made my husband waist his day and go to the Apple store when this is not how it was explained to us this works by an AT&T employee and the Apple store employees. I am becoming very frustrated with the service all around. We might just cut our losses and move all of our lines to Sprint. What steps do we need in order to move over to Sprint? 

My husband is home after 7 hours. Apple said they fixed it. Guess what, it is still frozen. Why am I paying 

Erin ***

*** (although you can’t reach me until my husband is able to exchange the phone I was given that doesn’t work for a new phone. he is still at the Apple store)

[Edited for privacy-This is a public forum. Please do not post personal or unique information such as but not limited to full names, employee ID numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, etc.]