Am I ready to shell out £1,000 for an iPhone X with its exciting new ‘Face ID’ feature? Of course not. Readers may recall I was keen to take several tech-steps back to the retro Nokia 3310 that was relaunched in March — but when I finally plucked up courage to take my unloved iPhone 3 to what turned out to be a Carphone Warehouse inside a Currys PC World on the York bypass, I was so hypnotised by the sales patter that I swiftly lost my willpower. Within moments I had given so much personal data that the salesman (as he acknowledged with a thin smile) could have emptied my bank account and assumed my identity before I got home. Had I really survived this long without their £10-a-month insurance deal on top of my contract? OK, sign me up. How about a £19.99 gadget to transform my connectivity on the move? Sounds great. Only another £25 a month! Aha, no thanks…
And so we went on for an hour or so, until I left with a new contract that costs a third less than the old one, and a new iPhone SE — almost identical to my previous model but with much longer battery life — that didn’t cost me a penny even though its manufacturer Apple retails them at £379. This is the modern mode of business that blinds consumers with dynamic-pricing complexity overlaid on technical jargon; but if you go with the flow, challenge the salesman when he doesn’t look you in the eye, and keep asking for discounts, you should come out feeling you’ve snatched a good deal. And feelgood is what it’s all about, because in the alternative universe of 21st-century shopping, you can never really tell when you’ve just been royally ripped off.
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