Anyway I go into the store, tell the guy I want to buy an iPhone and he gets my number to look me up on the system. He tells me that because I'm still within my current term it will cost me $150 to move onto an iPhone plan. I told him it is supposed to be free and he asked me how I knew that, so I said it was on the website.
He pulled up the Vodafone site and asked me to find it for him. So I jump on his laptop and pull up the box that shows it is free. He still wasn't sure so he asked a colleague, who confirmed that it was correct.
He carried on but then couldn't work out why the system wanted to still charge me the $150 transfer fee when he now knows that it is free. It honestly felt like it was 11th July and I was the very first person in the world moving to one of their plans, so I jokingly asked him if I was the first person to buy an iPhone from this shop. He laughed and said he's sold millions of them. I didn't ask but I was thinking "then why the hell do you not know what you're doing?!"
Anyway he then had to call over another colleague to ask about the fee, who told him that it appears as a charge then as a credit all on the same bill.
Once that was cleared up everything else went without a hitch.
It's a bit disconcerting when a customer walks into a shop and knows more about the plans than the employee, who supposedly has personally sold millions of them already. Then again, I guess if you were going to buy one of these phones you would do your research beforehand to find out the costs and so on to ensure you could afford it, but still, they should know all this already too.