Vodafone UK wouldn't sell Steve a phone!

You can’t make it up, you really can’t.

Steve Rowlands walked into a Vodafone shop recently to buy an HTC Desire. He was still in his 24-month contract and thus expecting to be asked to fork out a lot of cash for the privilege of swapping to the Desire.

(By the way, Steve is another Symbian/Nokia fanatic who couldn’t be bothered waiting for Nokia to get their act together — that 24-month contract was for an N97)

Steve walked into the shop with his credit card ready. He didn’t really care what the deal was. He’d buy the phone PAYG or he’d extend/upgrade/change his contract. He was expecting the sales people to embrace him with a commercially astute spirit. He knew he was going to be charged the best part of £400 or so.

No.

That was the answer he received:

“We can’t do that Sir”.

“What? Not on PAYG?”

“Ok, I’ll give you lots of money to upgrade my contract early”.

“No sorry Sir, computer says no”.

“Right, last chance, you are a shop, have HTC Desire’s in your stock room, how much do I have to pay to get one? Not PAYG, not an upgrade, just cash for a box. Just beep it through the till, hammer my card, and I’ll walk away happy.”

“Sorry Sir, we don’t sell phones in that way”.

Ok I give up.

Since when did Vodafone stop selling phones?

I wonder if it was around the time they stopped actually helping existing customers in their stores. I remember walking into a Vodafone shop a little while ago to ask them to change around my price plans. I wanted to do a bit of price plan management since I was regularly blowing 500 quid a month.

No. They told me to phone up. As an existing customer, they could only help me if I wanted to do an upgrade.

It’s not all bad news though:

Instead, I had to go to the bunch of cowboys in the Carphone Warehouse over the road, and they promptly snatched the cash out of my wallet before I even knew they had any Desire’s in stock!

Anyway, I now have my HTC Desire, I just didn’t realise businesses would be so fussy over selling stuff in this troubled economic time.

Steve also points out that he got an unrelated phone call from a chap in a Vodafone call centre abroad who helped him out by moving him from the 500MB data plan to one of the iPhone data plans (1GB data) at no extra charge.

Nice. If data’s becoming an issue for you on Vodafone, you might want to ask them to move you to one of their iPhone plans.