Bill wants to publicly praise a store that went above and beyond to make him happy after his Palm Pre failed during the holidays. He writes that the store employees put in extra effort on December 26th, a hectic retail day, to make sure that he received the phone he needed in a timely manner. That store was… Radio Shack.

On Black Friday (11/27/09), both myself and my wife got Palm Pre phones as an early Christmas gift from her grandparents (which was pretty awesome). We went to the Radio Shack in the Countryside Mall at Clearwater, FL to get them since they were having some kind of deal on them that day. We were quite happy with the phones until two days before Christmas, when the touchscreen on my phone suddenly stopped responding to touches. I tried what I could in terms of resetting the phone and did some internet research, which told me that I would likely need to have the phone replaced since not many people had luck reviving dead touchscreens on their phones. Due to it being the Christmas period, I wasn’t able to get the phone replaced immediately and finally managed to get back into Radio Shack on the day after Christmas, only to find it packed to the gills with people. I managed to get some help pretty quickly from their phone tech, named Preston, who had actually sold us the phones and remembered me from when I picked up the phones on Black Friday. He quickly verified the problem and told me that their Radio Shack location was all out of Pre phones that they could replace mine with. I didn’t even get a chance to think about what to do next when he asked me if I had any other shopping in the mall that I needed to do that day, and that he’d be back in about 45 minutes. He turned and told his manager what was going on and then told me that he’d go to another Radio Shack in town that had a phone in stock, pick it up, and bring it back for me. It took him slightly longer than he’d said (actually waited about an hour), but sure enough he came walking in with my replacement phone and the replacement process itself only took about 5 minutes.

I was very impressed that on the day after Christmas, Radio Shack sent out one of their workers to another store so I wouldn’t have to go get it myself. I’m not disabled or elderly, and I could have easily been expected to go get the phone at another store on my own. I hope that this Radio Shack location continues to do well if they treat their other customers the way they treated me.

Yes, exactly. Kudos to this Radio Shack location, and we hope that the management is not punished because we’ve revealed its location.

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