AT&T

I have always been underwhelmed when needing to go into a mobile phone stores no matter who the carrier was. It always seems there are long waits for no particular reason, pushy sales people constantly trying to upsell you, and staff who end up knowing less about their products & services than I do. So I try to do everything online whenever possible. However, my iPhone 3G has been semi-broken for about 2 months and I finally got fed up with it. So I decided to suck it up and go to the store to buy a new iPhone.

Now I did try to do this once before in MA about a month ago and got such a run around from the staff at the Apple Store I decided to just deal with it being broken. My experience here was the complete opposite. The staff were actually nice, helpful & knowledgable. I was shocked, but very pleased. They for one had iPhone 4's in stock and second did not seemed bothered by some of my questions I had on it before I went with it. They spent the time to go over everything in what was probably overkill for me, but was interesting. They went over the process on how to move data from the old iPhone to the new one, activated the phone for me & tested the phone for both voice & data on it.

So with this new find I think I will no longer have to do any mobile phone stuff on the web anymore. Hooray for good staff in my local store.

My husband was having a lot of trouble with AT&T after switching to them from Straight Talk. He had the Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket and went through 4 of them because they all had problems. They kept dropping calls, but just on one end.. so like, he could hear the other person, but he could shout and scream all he wanted and they wouldn't hear a word of it.

I went into the store to pay his bill and ask when his new phone was going to come in (at this point we were on phone 3 heading to phone 4). The woman I spoke with told me it was sent on July 29th and should be there soon (this was on August 4th or 5th). My husband called about a week later to ask about his phone because it still hadn't arrived. They told him that their insurance company had never mailed the phone (still upsets me that the woman lied to me about it).

However, around September, AT&T finally resolved his issue by letting him purchase the Samsung Galaxy S3 for about $150. Also, the company president is making an effort to retrain the Rutland staff to make sure that it's a great company. Not to mention, they have a kiosk where you can pay your bill instead of waiting forever for a staff member to acknowledge you or become available. Overall, it's a decent store and they're getting better.