New Metro employee lists some of the shady stuff he's already seen take place in his store
A new Metro employee says that at the store he works at, he sees another level of shady practices going on.
Not all of the shady stuff that goes on at wireless stores happens at a T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, or Boost Mobile corporate or authorized reseller location. There's probably a good chance that the MVNOs are also up to their necks in funny business. For example, this recently hired Metro store manager had left the company he worked for where he was a manager. He decided to apply for a job at a Metro store and was hired. On social media, he wrote about what he experienced.
This Metro store operated at another level of shady
Having worked sales at a prepaid wireless firm before, this Redditor was used to seeing things that weren't quite kosher taking place. Sure enough, during the first few days of training, he discovered that this Metro location was shady. Now there is shady and there is SHADE-D. This might have gone beyond the latter as the new employee said that even after all of the things he experienced at other prepaid firms, "This was another level."
Most Metro stores are owned by independent companies. | Image credit-Metro
For example, he explained how system numbers were blocked to prevent customer surveys from being sent out. Store personnel filled out their own surveys and submitted those instead. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. Fake receipts were handed out and sometimes, no receipt was handed out at all. A fake receipt printer was on hand to make it appear that a phone number was being inputted on some machine.
The reps would pretend to port over a number or straight out refuse to do it. Not surprising, the new employee saw his colleagues overcharging customers and he said that a lot of what was going on was "straight up theft since they weren't using the official POS (Point of Sale) machine and just taking payment on something separate."
Since Metro doesn't have Corporate stores, when he reported what he saw, it wasn't through Metro or customer service. It might not matter who he reported this to. Another Redditor works at a different Metro location and his experience is just as bad. This rep says he works for a Metro dealer that does things the right way, and when he did see employees near him "shaft the customer," he reported them although he pointed out that "nothing gets done to them." He claims that T-Mobile just wants to report its share of the profits from Metro. That would be done to keep the stock rising.
Someone else had an intriguing thought. T-Mobile might not care what is happening to Metro customers not because the majority of these stores are owned by independent dealers, but because the carrier has a plan for these customers. The goal, according to this post, is to run Metro like a stepping stone that converts prepaid customers to postpaid customers.
The industry needs to be cleaned up
To prove his point, he states that he has been receiving texts for at least a year from Metro telling him how he can get a new phone for free by switching to T-Mobile from Metro and the texts list all the "benefits" he can receive from being a T-Mobile customer instead of a Metro subscriber.
This right here is a big reason why this business remains a cesspool. Management at the companies that own the individual stores surely know what is going on as do the suits at T-Mobile. But no one wants to be responsible for killing the duck that lays the golden eggs. So instead, complaints are buried because the stores are making too much money for multiple firms. This is all done at the expense of the customers, many of whom are laughed at right behind their backs.
If the regulatory agencies would make an example out of some of the firms running prepaid stores that cheat customers, and the major carriers that enter into deals with these shady outfits, we might start to see the start of a very much-needed cleanup of the industry.
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