Replicatable Success Story?
I called Spring with the current (as of yesterday) $149 offer from Amazon for an upgrade and asked if they could match it or credit my account for $50. "Telesales" said no (and too much other blah blah blah), so I asked if they could forward my call to the dept. that had the power to do that. They forwarded my call to "Account Services," I believe it was called.
I politely (always important) and succinctly told the account services guy who answered the phone, "I'm upgrade eligible. I want the Epic Touch. Amazon has it for $149 for upgraders. I asked Telesales if they could credit my account for the diff ($50). They said they did not have the power to do so, but you do. [<--this and a little luck might have been critical to what happened next] Can you credit my account for $50 so that I can buy the phone from you?"
The very nice CSR on the line replied, "Yeah, I can do that. How about I give you an $80 credit--even more than you asked for?" To which I, of course, agreed. He credited my account and then left me to buy the phone online on my own since it would be cheaper that way (more $ for phone assistance).
Between that and the $90 buy back for my almost 2-year-old, slightly dinged original EVO 4G that I plan to take advantage of once my sweet new phone arrives, I will have accumulated $170 in credit towards my new phone (for which I am technically paying $199 + $15 tax + $36 in activation--I couldn't get them to budge on this like in past).
Not $79 at the Furniture Store (which I've never heard of), but still, not too shabby! And probably replicatable for others with deals you find online...(though $80 sounds to me like close to the max of what they are authorized to credit us). Obviously, knowing that they can do at least $80, I would advise anyone trying this with a deal from another source bump up their requested credit amount--perhaps to $90?
Good luck!
{Note: Ordinarily, I would strip and sell my phone and accumulated accessories on Ebay for more $$ to offset costs, as I did my Palm Pre for $120, but in this case, I am totally cool with giving Sprint my phone since I am replacing it now before the LTE roll-out because it has a ding in corner where I dropped it on concrete and also has started acting off since my gf dibbled water on it last weekend.}