Reports are coming in that AT&T phones are available again for sale to New Yorkers.
Amazingly, there is no official statement from AT&T trying to explain what happened and what is going on. This is unbelievable for a major corporation. Something is seriously wrong with the management that a day after such a PR nightmare they have no official response.
It would appear that they don't want to admit to the real reason for cutting off on-line sales to New York, which is starting too look like a simple money grab. Reports are there were discounts available on-line that they didn't want New Yorkers to take advantage of over the Holidays so they forced them to go into the stores and pay more. That's sounds like the greedy AT&T we all know. Why get a dollar from your customer for tens cents of service when you can get a dollar and a penny?
The other possibility, that AT&T stopped making sales because it was worried its already overloaded network would get even more overloaded, seems less likely. I mean, AT&T shows little interest in really solving it's New York problems, and a brief sales slow down wouldn't mean much, especially if you can still buy the phones in retail outlets.
Regardless of the real reason, it's unbelievable that a publicly traded company of this size has no crisis management team in place to deal with these kinds of things when they hit the media. We already learned that with Operation Chokehold and the negative response to the floating of tiered pricing, but this has to be the worst example. 24 hours after a widely publicized news crisis and there's no official response? This moves beyond some idiot flacks and really speaks badly of senior corporate management. This company is headless.
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