Quote:
Originally Posted by liltyke
Well I'm in the middle of my contact but I would love to get a Hero. The Sprint rep I talked to said the best he could do price wise was $404 (after my $75 credit). Can retailers such as Best Buy beat that price or will I end up paying the same price regardless where I buy.
thanks for any info.
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Pricing is a bit of a confusing subject when it comes to phones.
I'll start with outright pricing, because that is the simplest to explain.
Buying a phone without any kind of discount, sprint will have it the cheapest. When you start going to third party retailers (Me at Radioshack) we are charged about the price Sprint CHARGES for their phones so, in order to not lose money on the sale, we have to charge a bit over retail.
Now on to the red tape-ish stuff.
When you are given a carrier discount - for instance,your $75 one year upgrade - we just pull $75 off of the retail price, so you'll pay about the same price at The Shack or at sprint, because, when you renew your contract, Sprint gets to keep a subscriber, making them more money, and the third party retailer (me) makes residuals off of Sprint for getting you to not dump them. When pricing is REALLY different is on 2 year (150 $) upgrades. At that point we aer ALWAYS cheaper than Sprint. Sprint will have you pay a certain amount up front, then get mail in rebates and blah blah blah. Third party retailers, because we get residual kick backs from Sprint, do not need to do mail in rebates because the residuals cover the up-front costs you would pay at a Sprint Corp. Store. This means that we can apply our own INSTANT rebates and have you out the door with a phone cheaper than you would've gotten the phone AFTER MAIL IN REBATES in the Sprint store.
So, long story short (Too late for that i guess) on a $75 rebate, i wouldn't hold out TOO much hope for a huge price drop somewhere, but it could happen. Good luck, my friend.