Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
It was bound to happen, and bound to happen at the hands of Sprint.
The carrier this week showed its desperation by going nuclear, also previously referred to as “happen.” The carrier unveiled a free service offering targeting “students” that includes free voice calling, messaging and 1 gigabyte of data service. Sure, a customer needs to pay full price for a device and that customer needs to be a “student,” but that first hurdle is becoming the norm across the industry, and that second one is just laughable.
Joining Sprint in the game of brinksmanship is big-box retailer Best Buy, which is in a similar desperate position to Sprint in trying to remain a viable entity in the face of growing competition. In the case of Best Buy, that competition is online retailers like Amazon.com and more general big box retailers like Walmart and Target. Two desperate souls embarking on a desperate scheme. What could go wrong?
To be considered a “student” all one needs to do is provide one of the following: a current student identification; enrollment confirmation for the current school year; a current report card; or an enrollment confirmation or tuition receipt from the current school year. Those students that are home schooled will need to provide state documents confirming that option. One final option to garner “student” status is to just show up at a Best Buy and say you are willing to pay full price for a new phone running across Sprint’s network. (That last one might not be officially correct, but I am guessing it will work in most cases.)
For Sprint, perhaps this was its only course of action at this point. It has been the prime source of growth for its rivals over the past year and late this week Consumer Reports piled on the misery by releasing a survey that found the carrier was least liked by its fickle readership. Talk about kicking someone when they are down.
Sure, Sprint recently announced its Spark program, which at least from a marketing perspective could allow the carrier to regain some of that early “4G” marketing swagger it enjoyed back in those crazy WiMAX days.
And the recent influx of money from Japan’s Softbank could help fund dance lessons to enhance that swagger. Though I am guessing that in turn the funds that went out the door to pick up Clearwire will downgrade the quality of those lessons.
T-Mobile US almost went down this path a year or so ago. Having been denied its acquisition by AT&T, the nation’s No. 4 carrier began on a path of “crazy” ideas that to its credit have ended up causing headaches for its rivals and brought in millions of new users. While some might consider many of those ideas nuclear-ish, they now seem to pale in comparison to where Sprint has gone.
Instead of blaming T-Mobile US, however, I am guessing instead Sprint was just getting tired of all the “free” service offerings being launched across its network from various mobile virtual network operator partners and figured: why not us?
Well, that’s a complicated question and hopefully something that does not result in any further damage to Sprint’s DNA. But, at this point, what does Sprint really have to lose?
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–Looks like people in New York City are so in love with Apple products that they want everyone else’s. A report from myfoxny.com noted that in 2012 nearly 20% of “all burglaries, robberies and grand larcenies involved Apple products,” which was 14% of all crime reported in the city. The report added that in total almost 16,000 Apple items were stolen last year.
Where the hell was Batman when all of this was happening? Don’t tell me he’s a Google man.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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