Recently Rachel’s Treo 300 gave out for the second time (the device’s hinge is a well-known
weakness). After hours of calls to Sprint customer service (the magic
word
turned out to be “design defect”) and “forum shopping” trips among the
different Sprint Stores in our area, she finally wheedled out a
replacement 300 from customer service. (Why it makes sense to
replace a defective product with the same thing is unclear to me). Now,
if our time was worth real money, we’d just plunk down another $coupla
hundred for a replacement phone… but since it’s not, she spent the
time fighting for a replacement phone. So in this case, customer
“service” is just another form of price differentiation: those who can
pay full price do so for the convenience; the rest of us get our
coupons in exchange for hard labor.
In
any event, the happy ending is that the Brookline that supposedly had
300’s in stock didn’t, so Rachel got a replacement Treo 600! Now she’s
well on the path to
Gadget Geekery.
