Rant: Stealing demo phones

[Swizz]

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people feel the need to steal a store's demo phone. The damn things are usually superglued and shut tighter than Pandora's box, and it would take a miracle and the presence of the Pope to get it opened without damaging something if they wanted to resell it. If they wanted to steal it to use it as is it is equally pointless as it takes about 10 minutes to realize the phone is gone and have the SIM changed.

So what the hell is the point? 99 times out of 100 the phone is going to be thrown away when the thief realizes it is bloody worthless. All it does is cause an inconvenience to the store it was stolen from. But people are still stupid enough to think that it is a worthwhile endeavor. It's not!

If you absolutely feel the need to steal something that will hold its value long enough to be resold: steal a bluetooth headset! They aren't serially tracked, so even if T-Mobile had the spine to criminally prosecute offenders it would be a snowballs chance in hell that the perp would be caught. And icing on the cake is they are usually left out in the open with nothing attaching them to a wall or fixture. Nothing to cut, no mess; and you wouldn't have to carry anything around that *may* be considered a weapon. Double bonus points!

In conclusion, stop wasting 30 seconds of my time in changing the SIM card and steal something that I wouldn't even notice to be missing.

Thank you.

 

[Talderon]

+1 This ruins sales and the ability for legit customers to test out phones before they buy them.

Although, one thing in the criminals defense, they're all stupid, so it's very unlikely they have enough brain power to come here and read this, but I bet it felt good to rant...

 

[BiGMERF]

thats toooo funny

sent from a Cuban prison camp

 

[Zardos]

People steal my FAKE display phones where I work. They look real, but are gutted of everything. WHY do people do this?

 

[aci78]

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people feel the need to steal a store's demo phone. The damn things are usually superglued and shut tighter than Pandora's box, and it would take a miracle and the presence of the Pope to get it opened without damaging something if they wanted to resell it. If they wanted to steal it to use it as is it is equally pointless as it takes about 10 minutes to realize the phone is gone and have the SIM changed.

So what the hell is the point? 99 times out of 100 the phone is going to be thrown away when the thief realizes it is bloody worthless. All it does is cause an inconvenience to the store it was stolen from. But people are still stupid enough to think that it is a worthwhile endeavor. It's not!

If you absolutely feel the need to steal something that will hold its value long enough to be resold: steal a bluetooth headset! They aren't serially tracked, so even if T-Mobile had the spine to criminally prosecute offenders it would be a snowballs chance in hell that the perp would be caught. And icing on the cake is they are usually left out in the open with nothing attaching them to a wall or fixture. Nothing to cut, no mess; and you wouldn't have to carry anything around that *may* be considered a weapon. Double bonus points!

In conclusion, stop wasting 30 seconds of my time in changing the SIM card and steal something that I wouldn't even notice to be missing.

Thank you.

I like the tutorial on stealing bluetooth headsets.

 

[kibble]

Oh man, this brings back a story from my working-at-radioshack days sometime in 2001-2002.

This was back when RS sold both VZW and Sprint phones. We had a demo phone of both, well someone swiped our demo Samsung sprint phone. Turns out that the guy that did it was named Alex and he gave "his" number to some chick that he met. How do I know this? Well one day soon after having been stolen, our new sprint demo phone rang... weird because no one ever called that phone.... Anyways, I answered it with the usual response:

Me: "Thank you for calling RadioShack, this is Alex speaking, how may I help you?"

Person on phone:*silence* "Wait, who is this?"

Me: "This is RadioShack"

Female on phone: "Are you serious? Or is this a joke?"

Me: "No joke, this is RS."

Her: "You're playing with me, right?"

Me: "No, I'm really not."

Her: "And your name is Alex?"

Me: *laughing a bit* "Yes!"

Her: "Are you being serious?"

Me: "Yes! My name is Alex and you've called Radioshack."

Her: "Well a guy I met named Alex gave me this cell phone number saying he had just gotten it and I dialed it and got you guys."

Me: "Well, this phone number belonged to a phone that we recently had that got stolen. We had the number transferred to a new phone and so you called us."

Her: "OMG I can't believe this! He lied to me! I'm not gonna talk to him anymore!"

It was pretty funny. The lengths some guys will go to make themselves look cool only to have it backfire on them....