Have you ever experienced in-store customer service so poor that you’ve felt like parking your car inside the premises as a way of expressing your dissatisfaction?
Florida resident Shinobia Montoria Wright appeared to do just that recently when she motored through the window of her local T-Mobile store in Palm Springs before getting out to allegedly smash up some glass displays and attack an employee.
The story starts when 26-year-old Wright visited the store last week in the hope of obtaining a free iPhone replacement, as her current device had a cracked screen. Staff refused, and so Wright left the premises with the damaged phone that she arrived with.
Having pondered the situation overnight, Wright returned to the store the next day. But this time she wasn’t in the mood for a discussion. Instead, she rammed her 2005 Nissan Armada SUV through the store’s main window, hitting the brake pedal only when the entire vehicle was inside.
According to reports, she then exited the car holding, of all things, a squeegee, which she used to demolish some of the store’s displays before going after a T-Mobile employee.
A passer-by caught the drive-thru hullabaloo on camera. As the video above shows, Wright appears to drive her car through the window in a fairly controlled fashion, entering at a slow speed as if finding a space in a parking lot. Once the vehicle comes to a halt, shouting can be heard from inside the store, which is hardly surprising considering what’s just happened.
A police account of the incident, as reported by the Palm Beach Post, noted that Wright had “told a store manager that it was her birthday and she was going to ‘bug out’ if she didn’t get the phone replaced.”
The manager told cops that the disgruntled customer did not “appear right” and may have been “under the influence of a substance.”
The suspect, who is currently in hospital receiving treatment for injuries to her arms, faces charges of aggravated battery, battery, burglary, criminal mischief, and reckless driving.
The story brings to mind an incident last year when a guy – an angry one – walked into an Apple Store in France and methodically smashed a load of iPhones with a hard metal ball.
At the inevitable court appearance that followed, the perpetrator said that on the day of the incident, he’d descended into “a state of monstrous anger” after store staff had earlier refused to offer him a refund when he complained about his faulty iPhone.
The crime resulted in a hefty fine together with a six-month suspended jail sentence with a two-year probationary period.
