Re: To be expected
To be fair to them, my last experience was okay-ish. One of the small things that swayed me was when I went in to look at the model I was after the guy in the shop was using one himself and let me have a look at his. I'd no intention of upgrading through my network (EE) this time, since while I'm generally happy with them they're poor at getting updates out, so I wanted a vanilla handset. While I'd been considering buying the handset outright (maybe JL or somewhere), CPW had a reduction (January sales) deal on their website, which worked for a network upgrade and was overall slightly cheaper (counting the increase in monthly rental and upfront payment) than the new handset. The overall result is I still have an EE contract (not paying CPW) with an unlocked base version phone.
They fell down a bit with the instore delivery. The day it was meant to arrive I didn't get a notification, but stopped by after work to check. Initially it wasn't there, then someone went off to check and discovered indeed it had arrived. Then had to go through a whole lot of document signing that left me wondering how it would have been dealt with if I'd gone for home delivery.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
