I’ve mentioned the Consumerist before. It’s a fairly large blog that gives customers another method of fighting back against bad customer service. All in all, I think it’s a pretty good blog, but occasionally, I find something on there that annoys me a bit.

For example, this post, which calls out T-mobile for poor (potential) customer service. While I will admit that T-Mobile probably could’ve helped this customer a bit better, I don’t think that the customer service in question was quite as bad as it many other examples that pop up on The Consumerist, and it certainly wasn’t as bad as the post’s title suggests.

The title is “T-Mobile: We Can’t Help You, Sell Your Brand New Defective Phone On eBay”. Reading the article, though, you’ll see that, at the time the customer service representative encouraged selling the phone on eBay, he had no way of knowing the phone was defective.

Here’s a summary of what happened:

• The writer of the original post (quoted at the Consumerist), whom I will simply call the OP from here on out, got a phone for Christmas, decided she didn’t want it, and asked the gifter to take the gift back.^[a]
• Because the return attempt was more than 14 days after the purchase, T-mobile wouldn’t take back the phone.^[b]
• The OP asked the gifter to send him the phone, and attempted to return it himself, with no more success — the T-mobile rep suggested selling the phone on eBay. At this point, no one involved had any clue whatsoever that the phone was defective
• The OP sold the phone on eBay, and the recipient discovered it was defective. OP refunded the money and took the phone back to T-mobile again.
• T-mobile again says that they can’t take the phone back.^[c]

Pay special attention to the bolded section above. The title of the piece suggests that T-mobile or one of its employees suggested that the OP knowingly sell defective merchandise on eBay, when the truth was that T-Mobile simply suggested selling what was (as far as they knew) a perfectly functional phone that the OP simply didn’t want.

1. Note that the gifter gave the OP a $350 phone. I’m assuming this is because the OP asked for it, or the gifter had reason to expect that he would like it. Asking the gifter to take back such an expensive gift seems very tacky to me, but I’m just weird like that, I guess. [↩]
2. This is the only time I really feel like T-mobile did something wrong, and even this isn’t wrong, just kind of short sighted. In the interest of good customer service, I’d probably extend these timelines around Christmas time, if I was a retailer. [↩]
3. At this point, I believe the OP should probably have tried to send the phone back to the original gifter and have him attempt to return it, though I’m not sure that would’ve helped — this far in, it would be impossible for T-mobile to know if the phone was defective or if it had been broken after the fact, I’d think [↩]