AT&T Store — Local services in Mount Vernon

We could not reach anyone by phone after several attempts because the phone would ring without being answered. So we had to drive to the Ballard location only to find a dark haired, bearded employee helping someone else. There were no other employees. In the good old days of customer service an employee helping someone else would have excused himself for a few seconds to tell the new customer who just walked in that he'd be with them in a few moments to at least get an idea of how he could help. Instead, he didn't look in our direction or acknowledge us in any way. He continued to twirl his hair while fiddling with another phone for the customer. After several minutes of uncomfortably wondering if we'd made a mistake coming to this store he finally had to go to get something for the other customer and as he passed us said we'd have to wait about an hour to be helped. We said we just wanted to buy a flip phone and he responded that there were none in stock and we have to go to a Fred Meyer or Target to buy a phone. We responded that it would have been great to have been able to call and find out this information but he was on his way back to the other customer so we left. As another review stated, this employee behaved as if he did not care. I'd prefer you did not give us back a chirpy reply along the lines of "You'll contact the main office and ask that this employee be retrained" or "You'd like us to come back and give you another try" or some such nonsense. Obviously from the string of negative feedback recently this store has an employee who just doesn't believe polite and courteous customer service is necessary and no, we do not believe you genuinely will see that he has "further training". It is likely that employees like him are driving old and potential customers away from AT&T - like us.

PS - Here is your automatic, electronic response, which I specifically asked that you not provide: "Thank you for your feedback. We'll pass along your comments to leadership so they can address and provide further training. We look forward to assisting you again!" - This is the same meaningless response you provide for all negative feedback. It is insulting and completely ignores the content of the negative feedback left by a customer who did not receive satisfactory service. Please keep these types of empty responses to yourself. As for this store looking forward to assisting us AGAIN, when we were not assisted to begin with, you clearly just push a button and stick your pre-written comments to the end of negative comments by dissatisfied customers. That in itself is an insult. You should know better. You...

Whatever you do, do NOT go to this AT&T store. I've thought long and hard about leaving this review, but our experience was, quite literally, the worst experience we have ever had at a cell phone store. The person who "helped us" did not bother informing us of the different memory size options of the phone my wife wanted.

Only after he had activated the phone did we find out that the amount of memory was not going to work (not enough) .... so they proceeded to charge us a re-stock fee of the phone we had just purchased in order to swap it out for a phone that would work.

Oh, but that's not the worst part. Not by a long shot. This person also convinced us to switch our account from a personal to a business account. Seemed like a good idea, and it would've been ..... if he hadn't COMPLETELY butchered the process of transferring our phones and service.

As a result, we had to spend HOURS on the phone with AT&T, who, to their bewilderment, could not even locate the phones we had on our account because he had messed up so badly.

On top of all of this, we were told multiple times that the store couldn't return the phone that we hadn't actually left with (due to needing to upgrade to one with more memory) and that they would have a return label sent to us to return the phone. Of course, they never actually followed through on this, and I had to spend another few hours of my time trying to get AT&T to send me a return label.

This was a total comedy of errors and ineptitude of the highest degree. I cannot imagine a worse experience trying to simply upgrade a cell phone (they had us at the store for almost 3 HOURS just to do the upgrade .... which they botched horribly).

As a business owner, I don't like to write negative reviews .... however this was such a painful experience (I have wasted at least 10 hours of my time trying to fix this mess) that I feel the need to warn anyone considering coming to this store.

DO NOT DO IT. Trust me. Go to literally ANY other AT&T store....

I’ve never experienced worse experience in a 5 minute period than I did when my daughter and I went in last week looking to buy a new I-phone.

I’ve bought nearly a dozen phones at AT&T stores over the years and that’s why we went to this store. When we walked in, we approached an employee and asked himpurcb. a new I-phone. He was working with another customer at the time and told us ver t. didn’t have any phones in stock.

What was notable about the interaction was his attitude; he didn’t stand up to talk to us, had a very indifferent tone and then matter of factly told us that it is not possible to purchase a phone outright at AT&T stores; he said you can only purchase, he said, if you buy on a payment plan. I knew this not to be the case, because I’d bought multiple phones in cash at AT&T stores in the past.

He proceeded, sitting, to argue with me that I must be mistaken. He clearly didn’t want my business and wanted me to leave the store, which we promptly did.

To not have any phones in stock, and then be treated as though he actively doesn’t want my business was surprising. Hard to fathom this store being in business much longer with this type of employee.

We immediately went to the Apple store at u-village and bought an iPhone 13. This was Wednesday September 21st at approximately 3pm. The person...