Young people should be forewarned to expect a determined sales spiel for phone insurance when they buy a new mobile phone.

Sales staff are persistent. They don’t make saying no easy. Declining politely is something young people could be helped to practise. Even older, experienced consumers don’t find it easy to stop the sales [...]]]>

Young people should be forewarned to expect a determined sales spiel for phone insurance when they buy a new mobile phone.

Sales staff are persistent. They don’t make saying no easy. Declining politely is something young people could be helped to practise.
Even older, experienced consumers don’t find it easy to stop the sales talk. Seamus McCauley of virtualeconomics website says he knows how the process goes, having bought about 20 phones in his life:

So buying a new phone earlier today from Carphone Warehouse, it went normally and unproblematically until we came to the part of the sale where the sales guy tries to sell me insurance I don’t need and I stop him as quickly as I am politely able. It’s not a big deal; he’s been told to sell it to me, there’s no chance of me buying it, we just need to get through a few seconds of it so he can tell his boss he tried.

Today though, a new and exciting twist. As he started the usual pitch and I stopped him, he said “FSA regulations require me to tell you this”.

Now, here’s a thing. That simply isn’t true. There’s no FSA regulation that requires a mobile phone customer to hear a pitch for insurance.

I pointed this out twice and he continued to claim it, until finally I told him I wanted to record him saying that FSA regulations required me to hear an insurance sales pitch and got my (old) phone out ready to do just that.

Threatening to record a sales assistant may be a bit on the confrontational side. But Seamus McCauley’s certainly right on the facts. Claiming that the financial regulator requires the spiel is not new, though. Nor is it only a mobile phone problem. The same baloney was exposed in the Guardian money pages three years ago in the selling of motor insurance.

It’s also worth letting young people know of the unauthorised companies who try to sell insurance or warranties by cold-calling purchasers of new phones. This, as the FSA makes clear, is likely to be an illegal scam.