Yesterday, a Xiaomi Mi 9 took to Weibo to explain his bad ordeal at a “Xiaomi Home”. The customer said that he went to purchase the largely unavailable Xiaomi Mi 9 and he was told to leave the box behind for one month. He couldn’t exactly understand why he would pay money for a device and will be asked to leave some part of “his properties” behind for 30 days. Xiaomi’s official quickly responded to this report saying “Which Xiaomi Home did this? We will verify and send you a reasonable answer as soon as possible!”
Gizchina News of the week
After the request by Xiaomi for the exact “Home” that did this, the buyer went back to get the details of the “Home” when he realized that he was in a “Xiaomi authorized store” (some of these authorized stores are so massive are contains mostly Xiaomi products that you may easily confuse them for a Mi Home).
Looking at the issue critically, netizens have reported that this situation sometimes occurs in offline stores and there are two possible reasons for the authorized store to do this. It’s either to prevent scalpers from handling this device or it’s done so that this smartphone cannot be re-sold for a ridiculously high price a few days after purchase. Without the phone box, it’s difficult for these to occur. However, if the demand is massively high, keeping the box for months wouldn’t make any difference because there are small scale manufacturers who can forge the packaging box in minutes and it will be seen as original.