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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."
Hell, two lines, unlimited voice, and paying extra for even 200MB of data would still be a hell of lot cheaper than what AT&T is offering now for a "family" iPhone plan.
When I traveled to Hong Kong and London w/ my unlocked iPhone I picked up prepaid SIMs for around $15 that were more than enough to cover voice and data while traveling, and were substantially less expensive than what I'm locked into at home in the US.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Somehow I doubt Wal-Mart is going to drive AT&T and Verizon out of the wireless marketplace.....
Besides, the criticism that you've made applies more to Barnes and Noble than Wal-Mart. I've not personally observed Wal-Mart raising their prices after driving the competition away. I did observe Barnes and Noble jack up all their prices shortly after the last independent book store in my home town closed up shop.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This "cost per gigabyte" isn't neccessarily a fair comparison.
Bottom line, maybe this plan isn't for you.
I'm having a difficult time hating wal-mart on this issue.
On one hand we have Walmart--a company known for undercutting their competitors and forcing everyone in their supply chain to work for peanuts...On the other we have a small collection of telecom giants forcing the U.S. market to pay inflated prices because of the lack of real competition.
Sometimes walmart puts up a necessary fight. Imagine what the music industry would be charging for a Ke$ha album if it wasn't for walmart's influence. Yeah $10-15 is still overpaying, but if the music industry had their way this garbage would probably be selling for $20-25USD today.
Yes walmart has a nasty track record of unfair competitive practices. But in this instance I think walmart has correctly identified a discrepancy in market pricing, and is now using its dominant position to profit and steer the industry in a more healthy direction
There is a market for people who dont use smartphones. Some people will never have a need to use the web/online apps from their phone
I worked for metroPCS for a year. I would never use their service, but they really hit home with the $35 all you can eat talk and text. For the budget conscious person or "phones are meant for talking" crowd, this plan is great. Along came Cricket(metro was in my area first though i believe cricket existed first) to offer the same thing. People ate it up. These two companies had piss poor service outside large cities and suburbs, but they offered the people something reasonable. If you dont travel its great. Fast forward and now Boost Mobile offers a truly flat rate for talk, text and 2way. Today we see Walmart and Tmobile team up. This is the best offer yet for the budget crowd because i think Tmo offers the best coverage for their prepaid maps.
Will they offer the latest and greatest phones? No. They dont have to. Their target audience probably wouldnt have much use for even the most basic feature phones(maybe qwerty, camera, and bluetooth) Another reason is to keep costs down. Without a contract, the company cannot subsidize the phone purchase. Average Joe isnt going to buy a $500 phone if all it does is talk and text. he might buy that $100 phone that lets him shoot pictures and connect a handsfree headset or wired earpiece though. Afterall, those might be useful.
The bottom line here is that there will always be a market where the dumbphone remains relevant.
Now that these companies have trashed any form of local retailer, they have to expand into new areas to swell their profits; this is why they now offer mobile phones, home insurance, pharmaceuticals and even home mortgages in some instances.
When is the populace going to wake up & realise that cheap is not necessarily best? >
I come at this from a different angle. I grew up in a town that was 20 minutes from a city. There were towns farther out that were an hour or two from anything worthwhile.
Living in these places SUCKS!
Everyone keeps going on about 'mom and pop' and 'buy local' but the experience I've had with local businesses in places like these is that they get away with charging obscene prices because they're the only game in town. Milk - costs more at the local mom and pop store because you have to drive 20 minutes in any direction to find a competitor. Gas? Same deal. And the selection is awful. You get whatever they give you and nothing more. People would drive an hour to get to a real store - a Walmart or a Target or a Best Buy - and stock up for a week or weeks at a time. Driving an hour to get a better price on gas when filling up your 100 gallon tank was justified.
So Walmart comes around and wants to build a store in your podunk town and suddenly hippes and 'progressives' from the city are telling you to oppose it because it 'destroys local business'. What? Mom and pop were trying to destroy us slowly with high prices and terrible selection for years, and now someone wants us to help them out because Walmart comes in and charges us a reasonable price for something? AND has a better selection? No thank you.
You know what else you get with a Walmart? It's a little slice of civilization compared to what you can find out there. That odd DVD rental machine in the front? A Godsend to someone who has no video rental store. And the faux bank where you can cash checks, send money, and have your taxes done in season? Compared to what was on offer before there was Walmart it's amazing. You go to a Wal-Mart in Chicago, Los Angeles, or Walcott Iowa and it's always the same - same selection, same prices, no favoritism, no prejudice no bullshit. They just sell you things.
So now they do cell phones too? If you live in a city, yeah, it's superfluous. If you live in the middle of nowhere it's another Godsend (as long as your nowhere has T-Mobile anyway). To have a place that will sell you something for a fair price and give you a decent selection of phones? Listen, you all may take it for granted, but plenty of people don't live in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. They have significantly fewer options and Wal-Mart is on the whole a positive for them.
http://angryee.blogspot.com
Well yes, and apparently most customers didn't think spending so much of their income on food was as wonderful as you do. It's very unlikely that grocery stores are involved in a huge conspiracy to force everyone to eat worse food. They'd probably much prefer to sell higher-quality higher-margin products because they'd earn more profits; Whole Foods does exactly that. But amazingly it turns out that different people have different price/quality tradeoffs, and I don't see how any of them are objectively wrong.
And they shouldn't have that choice?
Right. And I'm sure that if the stores raised their prices to the "proper" level, you would not at all be complaining about price gouging and how the poor can't afford to feed themselves.
And I take it Netflix is the devil incarnate.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
(or fund a China-backed company),
Get over it. You live in a China-backed country. Who do you think is buying all those worthless 30-year T-bonds? China is, so Americans can keep going to WalMart and keep the Chinese factories in business.