Verizon — Local services in Town of Poughkeepsie

Kristina was very helpful and knowledgeable in helping me set up a Gizmo watch (with inexpensive insurance plan) for my active 7 year old. If you are thinking about doing something like it for your kid, DO IT! and go to Kristina for help. I thought I'd done my research, but she definitely gave me some extra pointers.

This thing is great! We've had it for a while now and it has been worth every penny. For a little back story, my son is a bit on the adventurous side and got himself lost (to us, he thought he was fine) in the woods surrounding our home. I decided I needed the ability to track him, did some research and headed to Verizon to get a Gizmo. He absolutely loves it and I love that I can track him, but it has more uses than that.

What if it gets lost? The band around the watch connects in 3 places. My son wears the thing all day, every day and it's never been a problem.

What if my kid's in a bad service area? See how I said, "the woods surrounding our home"? I live in an area notorious for poor reception aka the boondocks. I have never once had a problem locating my son's watch, even if my phone couldn't connect a call.

30 second automatic answering. If your kid doesn't answer within 30 seconds, watch picks up automatically and you can hear everything going on in the background. Concerned about a bully on the bus? Set the watch to silent mode and call. You can hear everything being said by and around your child. My son goes out riding quads with my husband often. I have the security of knowing if, God forbid, something happens to my husband, my son can call me and I can find him.

Silent Mode: With the Gizmo app on your phone, you can set silent mode for specific times during the day. For my son, his phone is silent from the time he gets on the bus to go to school until a few minutes before he's due to arrive home. This stops them playing with it in school.

Texts and calls: The watch can only make and receive calls and texts from numbers you program using the app. No giving out a number to potential creeps. I love getting random texts from my son when I'm at work. You can also choose specific texts that are allowed to be sent so there isn't the distraction of full text conversations.

Alarms: You can set alerts to remind your child to finish chores or tasks. The watch will beep to let them know what the task is. You can give a time frame and the watch gives virtual rewards for things being...

Not thrilled with my experience last night.

My phone broke, completely done. I did order a new phone, but needed something in the meantime while waiting for it in the mail. I raced to the store, a good 30 min away, at 7:30 pm (30 min before closing) and brought them an older Verizon phone in working condition. I was greeted by about 4 employees just hanging around, sitting on a couch. Again, it was close to closing time, so whatever. I told them that I wanted to get a new SIM card in order to transfer information from my broken phone and put it into the working phone I had with me. Generally when switching information between phones, even if I've needed an entirely new SIM, this process has historically been smooth and takes literally 5 minutes. However, it was not smooth.

I was first asked "Where did you get this phone?" although I'm not entirely sure why that matters. Then I was told that it needs to be a Verizon phone. No problem, check. Then when I gave them my phone number, it turned into, " we cannot do any switching without the account holder physically standing here." I told them I'm not sure if I'm on the account as the holder or if it's my father , as we are on a family plan. I offered to get my father on the phone, to get the pin code needed, etc. However, the employees all just looked at me and said "sorry can't do anything."

The inability to even OFFER a work around or solution is honestly what annoyed me the most. I had to sit there coming up with solutions, all of which got shut down ( although I am fairly certain there were ways for them to figure out who I was, as my phone number is clearly attached to the account)

Again, I'm not sure if policies changed or if this just falls on those particular employees, but I will say they were totally unhelpful toward finding a solution.

Needless to say, I will not be...

I have been a Verizon Wireless customer for decades. My niece and I visited the store to price an upgrade for her phone. The first thing I said to Rebecca, our salesperson, was "is she able to upgrade to something within the price range she is paying now?" Rebecca mentioned all these promos and trade-in credits and long story short told us my niece can get a phone, upgraded plan and a FREE apple watch for 89 CENTS more than what she pays now. Who could say no? The best part is that my niece's birthday was a few days away, so I was so happy she could get all of this. I asked Rebecca if there was a fee to transfer the info from one phone to another. My husband and I recently got new phones and avoided the $35 fee for that by transferring information on our own. Rebecca told me there was no fee (lie #1, we were charged and she summed it up by saying it's part of the initial fees). She also told me that the setup fee for the watch would be waived (lie #2, when my niece picked it up they wanted to charge her so she set it up herself). Remember the free watch (lie #3, I was charged, then credited, then told I had to pay the difference because the watch was the upgraded model not the free one. How would we know? Rebecca never mentioned it. She just asked what color my niece wanted.) Remember my niece would only pay 89 cents more for her new phone and plan (lie #4, she was accounting for discounts that are applied to everyone on my account not just my niece). In the end, my niece is paying double than what she was and if I knew ahead of time and had an honest salesperson, I would not have upgraded at this time. My niece makes minimum wage and cannot afford this unexpected...