Seriously, don’t do it. Go into a real store (in my case, Verizon) to buy your phone. At least then you’re dealing with the company directly.

Last week, when Mrs. sirhc and I were visiting Oregon, we took advantage of the absence of a state sales tax and a sale at Costco to buy two Samsung u550 phones. They seemed like a good deal at the time, and we were assured of a very liberal return policy, so we went ahead and bought them.

We soon decided that we didn’t like our new phones very much. The features seemed limited, and I couldn’t get the volume up to a decent volume on either of my Bluetooth headsets. I also decided that I really wanted a PDA this time around, and set my sights on the new Palm Treo 755p. So back to Costco we went, down here in San Diego this time.

The return went smoothly, but the guy working the kiosk at Costco didn’t seem very interested in activating our old phones. Since the kiosk didn’t have the phones we wanted, we didn’t worry too much about this and went over to the Verizon store instead. That’s when things stopped going smoothly.

The kiosk guy didn’t reset our contracts, and there was nothing the customer service guy at the Verizon store could do about it. I had our old phones reactivated and called the original kiosk guy in Oregon. He said everything was fine and fed me a line of, what the real Verizon customer service guy told me was crap. Apparently, the kiosk guys do this all the time, to keep their commission even after a customer backs out of the contract within Verizon’s 30 day trial period. I was about to call Verizon corporate customer service myself and ready to drive back to Costco when the customer service guy said he’d make some calls and bring his manager into it.

In the end, the Verizon store guys got everything straightened out. We got our contracts reset, so we were able to get discounts on my Palm Treo 755p and Mrs. sirhc’s LG enV. So far we’re pretty happy with our new toys.

And that’s the last time I buy a phone from a kiosk.