My AT&T shop experience

I have acquired an AT&T sim card. I didn’t necessarily need one — what with my MaxRoam sim on my N95 and T-Mobile’s 55p/min rate. However after the rather strange experience at The Grove shopping mall yesterday (no network operator stores anywhere to be seen) I wanted to get a bit of exposure to the kind of service being offered to Americans.

In this case, I popped into the AT&T store in downtown San Francisco. It was just gone 7pm and I was impressed the store was still open. It was more than open. I counted no less than 7 store assistants, most of them clustered around the till area.

I had a nose about. I briefly admired the Blackberry Curve on sale for $179 and a $39/month calling plan. I looked closer: That’s a 2 year commitment AND you actually need to pay $279 up front… and you get $100 ‘rebate’ back, via a mail-in coupon. Right. Whenever I see ‘rebate’ I think ‘makes our sales figures look temporarily good’.

I wandered over to the till desk and caught the first chap, asking him for a pre-paid sim card. He looked at me for a moment then turned his head to his colleague.

His colleague looked at me, then turned his head to his colleague. Who stared back.

Strange.

Walk into a mobile store in the UK and ask for a pre-pay sim and they snatch one off the shelve and process the transaction in 10 seconds.

After some feet shuffling and some pretty expectant looks from me, one chap took command — the team leader, I think.

“What is it you’d like sir?” he asked.
“A pre-paid sim card, please,” I repeated.
“Ah, ohhhhhh-kayyyyyy”.

More of the stand-about sales chaps looked at each other as they witnessed the hint of an impending transaction.

The team leader spent a minute or two attacking the keyboard of his terminal.

“Firstname?” he demanded.

I obliged.

“Lastname?”

Again, I obliged.

Another 2-3 minutes of tapping with the odd gasp of breath.

Eventually the team leader chap disappeared leaving the other five chaps standing listlessly looking at me.

I decided to engage one of them: “How would a British chap get a post-pay account then?”

I had to elaborate a bit. Explain I lived in London (“LONDON YOU-KAY”), then he got me.

“We need to have a mailing address and you need to pay a deposit.”

Ah. Interesting. My eyes swept across the shelves behind the till area and caught sight of some AT&T branded Shure headphones. Nice. They seem to be pretty hot on the funky accessories at AT&T. My attention returned to getting an account.

“But,” he said, straightening up with a slight grimace spreading on his face, “It’s a pretty steep deposit.”

Uh oh… “How much?” I asked. I’m thinking $2,000 up front or something.

He took a deep breath, steadied himself and spoke: “Five hundred dollars!”

“OK,” I said, to mildly shocked looks from the assembled AT&T team arrayed in front of me.

Sounds reasonable. Two hundred and fifty quid up front? I’m a total risk. They don’t know who I am, I have no US credit history and they don’t know where I live. Fair enough.

If the chap had been sufficiently enterprising, I think I’d have left the shop with a Blackberry and a 2 year service contract. I could have been up-sold there and then.

As it happened, though, the team leader returned clutching what I suspected was the fabled sim card pack. Why these things are stored out back, I don’t know. They’re hardly ultra valuable.

I handed over $40 ($25 for the sim card pack, $15 additional credit I wanted to add).

The chap did a lot more tapping and heavy breathing over his computer terminal. He took my cash.

Eventually he handed me a print out containing my new number and receipt.

Tah-dah!

Looking at my receipt, I can confirm that I was in store number 5161 and my transaction was processed at register 6. Joy.