yes and no....

We have been sending people away from our stores for two years. Do y ou have any scope as to how many activations that is? The real money will be with the family plan porting in from other carriers where daddy and mommy get the iphone and little billy and susy get lg neons. We try to pitch those sales to get the two non iphone activations but we continually get told that they just want to do it all in one place.

The worst part of my day is losing 3-5 lines because I dont have a certain phone

Unless someone is just plain hell bent on a particular model (i-phone is a great example) you shouldn't have this situation often. Goes back to the old sell what you've got. Tell the customer why it's in their best interest to go with the model you have.

As far as the i-phone goes...I've played with them and even toyed with the idea of going to AT&T to get one. Frankly I think they're over rated. 🙄

You don't need to tell us this. After telling people that the eternity/vu/blackberry is a better option and having them constantly returned so they can go get an iphone kind makes your arguement lame.

Why would acdc1a even make that comment when this thread is about the iPhone and us the indirect dealers? Of course we we're talking about the iPhone. The iPhone is the only phone in recent memory that people want regardless of better options available to them. Only an indirect for ATT could possibly imagine how much not having the iPhone hurts our sales. It hurts us on potential sales and it hurts us when people return sales to go get the iPhone.

I was only making the comment that it shouldn't happen too often that customers can't be reasoned with.

Last phone I can remember people demanding regardless of what was better for them was the Razr. Indirects were given those, but having worked at a competing carrier I can feel the pain. That said, there were very few customers who couldn't be talked into a different phone. Many that did leave ended up back to see me in short order.

The iPhone is the single most harmful product to the exclusive agent distrubution channel in the history of wireless sales. I do not say indirect because AT&T agents were further insulted when Wal-Mart got the phone before we did. I personally lost at least $500K over 2+ years of not having that handset.

You have no idea on what you speak.

I hope you don't think you lost 500k profit. After seeing the figures recently that would be far fetched the only one winning is steve jobs.

Sigma I heard our GP is going to be $45 per without accessories.

$500,000 divided by $45 per add is 11,111 new adds. Did you lose out on that much?

I think the practice of holding back phones is insane. I don't want you to get me wrong on that.

#1 - I had 7 stores with AT&T.
#2 - As has been previously discussed you won't sell all iPhones. Simply having the phone in store for the customer to compare keeps the sale in the store.
#3 - This was over a 21 month period. That is only $3401 in profit per store per month. Considering the iPhone is roughly 30% of AT&T's sales and their #1 smartphone you do the math. Our sales dropped by close to 20% immediately after the iPhone launched and trickled down to close to a 50% drop year over year when the 3G iPhone launched.

Furthermore I launched a new market for AT&T (I was chosen to be the sole agent in this market) with the expectations that I would be a part of this iPhone sales push. I was not informed until about 15 days before ...
(continues)

I feel bad about your situation, but it all goes to having all of your eggs in one basket.

If you become a State Farm insurance agent, you only represent State Farm. When they shut down the auto market for 18 months while they adjust to become profitable, you spend 18 months without an auto product. An independent agent doesn't have this type of limitation. At the same time they don't have the State Farm brand name. I have no real answers, just parallels to another industry.

You got the shaft. Along with lots of other dealers. Hope Verizon is treating you better!

So far so good.

Android - got 'em
BB Storm 2 - got 'em

I don't have to worry about not having the product that is #1 in product mix because someone sold their soul to the devil for net adds.

Did you ever open any Verizon stores in the new Alltel areas?

Only in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Were you on the managers conference call? You are correct, we wont make much more than that at all. That came from the big boss himself on the call a few weeks ago.

Hopefully we can push out 2-3 accessories with each unit though

texas....

has AT&T offered you to be one of their test stores for iphone sales?

makes you wonder what Steve Jobs and AT&T have on the backside for them to be only sold through direct stores..

I just can't see anyone (if the indirect channel gets them) buying one at $600 to $800 on a contract. Only way to make enough to pay out the commissions on them..not enough accessory sales to offset that..

I sold my AT&T stores and went to Verizon Wireless.