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| - Totally burned by this store
Over the last few months, my wife and I discovered we had been burned by this store several times. Let me explain. About three years ago, I purchased a Samsung S4 and my wife bought the Samsung Note 2 at the Northsight store.
About 18 months after buying my Samsung S4, it started having problems. I was plagued by messages that claimed the sim card wasn't installed, then the phone would either reboot or not connect to the cellular network.
I took the phone into the T-Mobile store on Northsight, and they replaced the sim card. That didn't solve the problem, so I brought it back. The store manager at the time checked my account and said:
1. The phone was past warranty.
2. At first he said I had insurance on the phone, but I told him that I had declined it. (If you have ever looked at your T-Mobile bill, you have to know the code name of the insurance plan to determine if you are covered or not.)
3. The manager checked the account again and said, oh yeah, you don't have insurance. (Presumably, he didn't want to deal with the fact that I had been tricked.)
4. The manager then said he couldn't fix my phone but he would give me $100 in exchange for a new one.
I turned down the offer, and resumed trying to find a solution on the web and by visiting a repair store. Those efforts failed, so I continued to struggle with my phone. I was able to use it by rebooting the S4 from 5-25 times a day, but it dropped calls, lost data, and completely sucked. I didn't want to spend anything on a new phone at the time, and lived with it for another 18 months when I suspected my S4 was going to die for good, and decided to buy a Note 4 from T-Mobile's website. I filled out the web form and declined insurance. I noticed that my monthly bill was going to be lower. Figuring that the lower monthly fee seemed highly unlikely, I called up T-Mobile to ask them if I had changed something in my account. Their response? I had insurance on the old S4. I was shocked, since the T-Mobile store manager told me 18 months earlier that I did not have insurance.
T-Mobile directed me to another phone number where I was told that I would get a new S4 in a matter of days. The new phone came a day earlier than predicted, so I was happy about that. But I was furious that I spent 18 months keeping the old phone alive when I could have been sent a new one right away. I told that to the T-Mobile representative, and asked for at least an apology from this store on Northsight Blvd. The store has had a couple months to get me that apology, but so far nothing.
At the same time my S4 starting rebooting uncontrollably, I asked the store manager to look at my wife's Note 2. Her phone kept displaying a Factory Mode screen on all of the navigational screens. The manager told me that the phone had been "rooted." My wife and kids are not at a level where they could root a phone, and for those who are not technical: rooting a phone is akin to pulling the engine out of a car to work on the piston rings. We had thought maybe our son had downloaded questionable software, but unfortunately - and unfairly - we blamed him for the problem.
We took the Note 2 to several places to be looked at, and no one had a clue what was going on. Finally, after I lost weeks doing research and trying different fixes, I discovered a setting had been changed at the root level. So, I spent hours and hours learning how to root the phone and fix the problem myself.
At some point during the process of trying to fix my wife's Note 2, we were shocked to discover that the phone, which we thought to be brand new when we bought it, was actually a refurbished model. At no point, during the purchase process at the Northsight store were we told that we were getting a refurbished model. We said we wanted a new one and until recently, thought we had purchased a brand new phone.
Today, we brought the Note 2 into a trusted repair place to get a damaged crystal repaired. The technician told us the phone would not be worth fixing because it was refurbished, making it nearly impossible to replace the damaged crystal. So now we have to think about getting a new phone for my wife, even though a quick replacement of the crystal would have normally worked fine.
I've never really quite had an experience like this with a vendor. I understand that some T-Mobile stores are independently owned while other are run by T-Mobile. Our repair technician said that he gets nothing but complaints about the two or three independently-owned stores in our area. He suggested from here on out, we only deal with the factory store, which is a 20+ minute commute from our house.
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