Wal-Mart To Launch Unlimited Wireless Family Plan
adeelarshad82 writes "Wal-Mart has announced that it will sell a post-paid wireless service powered by T-Mobile, which will be targeted at families. Users who sign up for Wal-Mart Family Mobile service will not have to sign a contract. The first line will cost $45 per month, and each additional line will cost $25 per month. Each line will have unlimited talk and text, so overage charges will not be an issue. For data access, each phone will come pre-loaded with a 100MB card known as a WebPak, which is shared among all lines on an account. Data does not expire, and refill cards can be purchased in Wal-Mart stores or online. The WebPak can also be used to make international calls at 5 cents per minute to any landline number in about a dozen countries."
I would assume that the catch is that Wal Mart gets unlimited access to all of those texts for data mining.
According to Nielsen it's those punk kids who are doing all of the texting - when they're not running on my lawn that is. So what better place to get up-to-the-minute data on a key marketing demographic than from their very own text messages?
Wal-Mart money does good things, too -- for example, paying a starving college kid to write a paper! (Wikipedia corroborates.)
yet they also pay minimum wages & have dubious practices when it comes to employee rights.
This was the only factual complain in your rant.
If you want to stop them from paying min-wage... change the laws about min-wage. Either raise it, or say that that rate can only be for X hours, or that employers over a certain size have a different rate... or whatever.
re: employee rights... same thing. Change the law.
You mentioned small business being run over by bigger firms... small business are just as guilty of the things you ascribe to wal-mart. Do you really think that the mom and pop business (with 3 employees) has a benefits plan? Nope. They dont have the scale to offer them. Do they pay more than win-wage? Nope. That's money straight out of the owner's pocket.