Its official. I’m going to be one of those insane people waiting outside my local AT&T or Apple store on Friday for an iPhone. I’ve even been doing some reconnoissance work ahead of time to make sure that the stores I’m thinking about waiting outside will, infact, have the iPhone this Friday.

And no, I’m not going to tell you which stores in my area will have them. 
But I did walk into what was I thought would be my top pick for an AT&T store to wait outside of. The store is in a horrible area and most people don’t know its there. The staff there are less-than-helpful, yet its once of the nicest designed stores I’ve seen.

When I went in this weekend to ask if they’d have the iPhone on Friday I was told:

“Uh… on Friday? No. We… uh… we won’t be getting those at the store level. Do you want to look at some other phones that are just as good, if not, probably even better?”

There are several things wrong with this reply. First, what is the “store level?” Aren’t all Cingular/AT&T stores at “store level?” I could understand if it was a kiosk or reseller, but it wasn’t.

Second, I would have thought that AT&T would have a scripted response to this question that would go something like this “Unfortunately, THIS store won’t have it on Friday, but we expect it shortly after. We have lots of great deals on other phones if you’d like to take a look … many of them have similar features to the iPhone.”

Third, yes, I understand the ‘need’ to try to turn a customer’s question into a sale. And, I understand trying to focus them on other phones (I even assumed part of their scripted response would be that!). But substituting the iPhone for a phone that is “just as good, if not, probably even better” is just a horrible phrase. - I think I laughed at that at least a dozen times over the course of the weekend.

Still, I am now curious to see what he’d consisder to be a “just as good, if not, probably even better” phone. He is the “expert.”