Two mobiles - Do staff notice?

cazzy6208

basically we have to break the seal on the box and check the imei/ sim numbers so that if you bring the phone back for a refund and it has a different sim or is a different imei, then you cant say it mustve been given to you like that. and we have to break the seal in front of you so that you see nothing dodgy is going on.

as for the 1 mobile per customer, like sum1 else said, it depends how awake the staff are on the day normally. and in our store we get so many people who speak no english in big groups buying a mobile each and then coming back the next week and doing the same, that we now use the big black argos stamp that hasnt been used in a year whenever someone foreign buys a mobile hehe.

reehsetin

Stockie wrote:

The only reason that the "one mobile per person" exists is that a lot of the cheap mobile phones are sold here then shipped to another country but never registered on a UK network (i think it's was about 90-95% of all multi-mobile phone sales were never UK registered). The UK network ends up making nothing out of selling the phone that they subsidied in the first place and Argos only get paid by the network when the phone is registered on their network. There was suggestion last year that all mobile would have to have been registered in the store (god that would have taken forever...) to cut out this practice but thankfully it never happened (yet).

It's another case of something being taken away because a small amount of people abuse it.

Check out an article on this here

Stockie

yep its a big prob now-a-days a lot of mobile stores have had to implement this
or some independent stores will unlock it and sell it under the offline/sim free price giving them a tidy profit.
3 have even resulted to gluing their sims into the phones

as for the phone either pay on the quickpays or pick the person on the till who looks the least like they want to be there

twice

i recently bought a mobile from argos it was goin to be a gift for someone so this guy brings it to the desk and breaks the seal i ask what he's doing and he tells me he has to check the contents anyway it's all fine but this is a huge problem for me how can i give someone a gift that has been opened so i tell him i'm not accepting it he asks why i point out that on the seal it says (i can't remember the exact wording but it was something like) if seal has been broken do not accept so off he went to get someone else who sorted out my refund.

executiverocker

if i was giving it as a gift, i would point out to the birthday person it had been opened to make sure it was in there....

jennybear

Heres a good reason to open boxes...couple of weeks ago our store gets a call claiming that the customer had been given an empty box rather than one with a phone in it (its not unheard of for sealed boxes not to have the contents in them). However the member of staff that served him, remembered doing so and writing the IMEI number on the receipt - this member of staff is so reliable and honest - trust them implicitly. Guy clearly lying but unless that member of staff had done that, we would have had no proof and probably would have had to replace the phone. Safeguards stores as well as customers.

cockler

are you bothered about the stores that rip us big time ? 1phone is nothing as long as it go's too a. genuine customer thats why way pay way high prices ?

twice

executiverocker wrote:

if i was giving it as a gift, i would point out to the birthday person it had been opened to make sure it was in there....

could say that but if the box was still factory sealed then there would be no need to open and check the contents

pavlovs_dog

twice wrote:

could say that but if the box was still factory sealed then there would be no need to open and check the contents

well quite clearly there is.. when we open boxes for customers on collection, it is not unheard of for items to be missing from the factory sealed boxes. (a lady i served the other day for example..open up a sealed box, we have phone and a charger..and that was it. no instruction manual, sim card or the other usual trimmings).

having opened the box and seen that there is something missing, we can give the customer a different box, one that has everything present and correct.

it saves a customer having to come back to moan that x, y or z is missing, and avoids them being treated with suspicion; because we have opened the box, we know that every phone leaves our store does so with all the appropriate odds n sods it is supposed to have. there can therefore be no doubt whether an item is missing because we've got a dodgy dealer who is trying to pull a fast one, or whether it just wasnt packed properly at the manufacturer's end.

trust me, it saves a lot of time, effort and embarrassment all round.

coopers12345

how can i give someone a gift that has been opened

Whenever my parents brought me a phone for birthday/christmas, they would take it out the box and charge it up before anyway, just do that, if they say anything, just say you thought you'd charge it so they could use it straight away

innox

I found argos to not be too stringent on the rule regarding mobiles.

I bought three for some triplets in the family (yikes) - Just told the assistant and there was no problems.