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College Students Turn Away From Landlines
prostoalex writes "You're as likely to find a landline in a college dorm as you're an old typewriter, according to this Washington Post article on MSNBC. While roughly 30% of college students had a cell phone 5 years ago, more than 90% have them today, resulting in student directories including out-of-state numbers instead of 4-digit extensions. More trivia on college students: 90% own a PC, 65% have broadband, 62% own a stereo system, 74% have a DVD player, 55% have a gaming system. What the Washington Post article also hints at, is possible tuition hikes due to the landlines dropped so quickly. "Six or seven years ago, telephones on campus were a cash cow," said Glenn Gaslin of Morrisville State College in New York."
In the UK, this has been the case for years. When I moved into Halls, there wasn't even a land-line phone available.
I'm a freshman at BU and on a floor of 45 students, there is ONE landline (owned by a non-US student), everyone has computers - and a few of us have more than one. There is roughly a 5:1 windows to Mac ratio... although it's a little squewed because a couple of us have desktops and powerbooks. Everyone, unless they're non-US residents, has cell phones. Over 50% of us have iPods, use iTunes and share music. Yeah, we're hardware-laden students... and I love it!
Take my wife & I as an example.. We had 2 landlines here in our house. One was ours, the other is paid for by my company (I work from home). During a 2 month period, our home phone got shut off no less than 5 times. And before you start to think it - no, we paid the bill each month, on time. Each call to Verizon customer service was greeted with an endless sea of automated menus to troubleshoot your line. Thankfully, you can keep mashing down the 0 key to get a human on the phone.
Each time this happened, we were told that we could expect to see a technician at our house in some ridiculous amount of time, usually 3-8 days. Then, mysteriously, the line would start working again. The explanation was always some inane excuse like, "someone unplugged your line at the CO" or "we had a mux that failed". We complained about rotten service to CS reps, Supervisors, Supervisors of Supervisors, and even to the office of Ivan Seidenberg (the CEO of Verizon for those who don't know). Know where it got us? Nowhere, fast.
Tired of the crap, we voted with our feet. We were spending about $50 a month for the Verizon line, plus about another $35 for my wife's mobile. We popped over to the Cingular store and got a couple of phones on a family plan. I got a new number and we ported the home phone number over to the wife's mobile. Now our phones cost about $65 a month. We can call any Cingular customer (now including AT&T Wireless users) for free, have free nights & weekends, 850 min/mo and rollover. No coverage problems around here, and it all "just works".
And hey, if you decide to do something like this - make sure you port to a carrier OTHER than Verizon Wireless. That is, if you're doing it because you're sick of Verizon. Otherwise, if you're happy with them, do whatever you feel like.
The unsig!
Here in Michigan (MSU), they provide landlines for free to students in the dorms. If you ask for a phone they will even give you that. Also, does TFA assume that if you have a cell phone that you don't have a landline? Cable TV is also provided for free to those who live in the dorms. I know they aren't technically "free" but you don't pay extra so you're a fool not to use either service.
It's like those computer stores that 'cash discount' their prices... Play on words to get around rules that prevent them from jacking up the price because you wanna pay by credit card...
Those computer stores likely have to pay as much as $0.25 plus 5% of the purchase price as a fee to the credit card company. If they wanted to charge the same price for cash or credit, they're have to raise the price for cash purchases. Online computer sales from small vendors are lucky to have an 8-9% margin, so having to give away 5% to your credit card company would mean they wouldn't be able to stay in business.
What you should actually be upset about is contracts that credit card companies force on merchants that prevent the merchant from passing on the savings to you when you pay with cash. It's not too long ago that you used to be able to get a 3-4% discount on gasoline if you paid with cash. Now you pay the higher price either way because the credit card company tells the gas station owner that he can't accept credit cards unless the price is the same cash or credit. The same goes for PayPal. Sellers aren't allowed to pass the PayPal fees on to the buyer... For fixed price items this means the price is higher wether you use PayPal or not.
The situation is even worse with the new Debit Visa cards. The fees are higher for the merchant if the customer doesn't use their PIN than they are for regular Visa charges, but smaller merchants have no leverage to negotiate a contract that lowers those fees, and Visa won't allow the merchant to accept regular Visa cards but not Debit Visa cards. The merchant is also not allowed to charge you more to use the debit card as a credit card, so the merchant is forced to raise all of their prices or to eat the fee.
It's the credit card companies that are evil... Not the stores that figure out a way to pass the savings on to you when you prevent them from paying credit card transaction fees.