<p>nice tip about the employer discounts - i get 20% off my bill with verizon.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone – I pretty much figured he wasn’t giving me the straight story. If we end up switching, it will be a wonderful change to have good customer service. I’ve been through heck and back with Sprint reps – the vast majority of whom aren’t located in this country and don’t speak English.</p>
<p>Not sure if you can get GOOD customer service, but I’ve been mostly satisfied with the T-mobile customer service I’ve gotten. Because H works for D of Defense, we get 15% off our phone bill, which helps. The 1st 2 years, we only had to have a one-year plan, so we could be sure we really liked T-Mobile before this past time when we had to renew for 2 years. So far, we’ve only had free phones.</p>
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<p>Horse puckey. The online Verizon tech was great, even though the phone and I were in different states! This after the local store insisted “No way we can activate that without more information.”</p>
<p>onward, the problem you are having is store related I think. I have upgraded about dozen times in the last four years (my phone, wife’s, kids, etc) and every single time the new phone we received was fresh out of the manufacturer’s box. Never got a used or refurbished phone. Make sure you are going to an actual Verizon company store as opposed to a franchised dealer.</p>
<p>We just got back from the Verizon store. D’s 10 month old LG Chocolate phone wasn’t working properly, people who called her couldn’t hear her, but she could hear them just fine. They replaced it with a brand new phone, same model, with her original memory card and battery.</p>
<p>I’ve had really good luck with Verizon customer service. When S ran up $80 in charges from text messaging (not realizing they cost $ per text), I called and gave my sob story and told them I wanted to change to unlimited texting - she took care of it and credited back the $80.</p>
<p>MichaelNKat, You hit it right on target. We made the mistake of going to an authorized dealer. We live in a small town and thought it was a regular Verizon store and thought that we would shop locally. Hah! Never again. I have spent a good part of today trying to track down the manager, apparently he only shows up when it suit him. The kid working there did give the manager my number but I haven’t heard from him. (I guess he can’t get to a phone; sorry, I’m becoming very cynical). I guess my next move is to contact the Verizon rep who works with these dealers. I managed to get the number from another authorized dealer. All this effort for a very basic phone!</p>