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Sprint Quickly Pulls Video Ad Calling T-Mobile 'Ghetto' (fiercewireless.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sprint has pulled an ad in which it was calling its competitor, T-Mobile, "ghetto." The ad featured company's CEO Marcelo Claure. "I'm going to tell you a carrier name and I want you to basically tell me what comes to your mind," Claure said in the ad. "T-Mobile. When I say T-Mobile to you, just a couple of words?" Which is when a white woman chimes in, "Oh my god the first word that came to my head was ... ghetto." "That sounds, like, terrible," she says. "I don't know't know. There's always, like, three carriers; there's AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. And people who have T-Mobile are just, like... Why do you have T-Mobile?""We're sharing real comments from real customers," Claure wrote in the aftermath of criticism. "Maybe not the best choice of words by the customer. Not meant to offend anyone."
As the only major carrier that told the Feds to get a warrant before they would provide access to all of your private data, Hero comes to mind before ghetto.
“I don't know't know. There's always, like, three carriers; there's AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. And people who have T-Mobile are just, like... well, you know, they’re like black and minorities and poor and stuff, and those people, like, live in, like, you know, the ghetto...”
So Sprint must be for self-absorbed inarticulate people, if you use their marketing example as benchmark.
I disagree. I live in a small town, and T-mo was basically unusable, whereas Sprint is almost OK, but still very problematic.
But it's a lot better than Verizon because I don't have to trade my car in for a beater and move into a shack to pay the phone bill.
This should've been linked in TFA/TFS somewhere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The Hot Club in Paris was founded in 1931. Django didn't even start playing guitar until 1928. King Oliver was playing jazz in New Orleans in the mid-1910s. But Buddy Bolden had already been playing jazz in New Orleans as early as 1905. That was before the term "jazz" was even invented, and before Stephane Grapelli or Django Reinhardt had even been born.
Buddy Bolden is considered by jazz musicians, historians and musicologists as having started the first band that played improvised music of the type later known as "jazz".
Now, don't you feel a little bit stupid?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have used t-mobile for about 5 or 6 years. I have never had a problem with the service. Contrary to what that airhead customer thinks, I don't live in a ghetto.
:)
I love to see the look on the faces of my ATT friends when I tell them I only pay $50/month for unlimited text/calls/data (up to 2GB at 4g then throttled back after that). I also have rollover data, so what I don't use gets put on the next month's "allowance". They just sent me a text the other day showing I have about 6GB of 4g-speed data to use.
And recently they mentioned something about certain kinds of streaming traffic not counting towards your monthly allotment. I haven't really looked into it yet.
On a personal note, the attitude of that customer makes me sick. I have friends and family of different races. I know people who live "in the ghetto". They are not subhumans you can look down your nose at...what a bitch.
And, oddly enough, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "Sprint" is "white trash".
What's odd about that? Sprint is NASCAR's biggest sponsor.
I am one of T-Mobile's earlier customers. I signed up with them shortly after they formed in 1999 because they were the only carrier in Metro Detroit that offered GSM, and I thought it would be useful to be able to use my phone in Europe where I worked for a week or two once a year. Indeed, I used my phone in Europe sparingly. Thanks to number portability, I've had the same phone number for the entire 17 year period.
We've had our ups and downs, but for most of those 17 years T-Mobile was the cheapest option, sometimes by a large margin. Their data service is fast, but only if you get a 4G or 4G LTE signal. You don't want to be stuck on their Edge network for longer than brief periods. Edge is not much better than 1999-era GSM.
I haven't gotten a 3G signal in many years, except where T-Mobile has a roaming agreement with another carrier. In these roaming areas, they give you a tiny monthly allocation of data which I normally exhaust in a few hours. You can still make calls and send text messages as normal. This leads me to conclude that while other carriers have wider deployments, T-Mobile has done a great job at providing coverage where their customers actually live and work. Unfortunately, when you go camping and you have roaming coverage instead of Edge coverage, you will quickly not be able to use the Internet at all, rather than have to settle for slower speeds.
I live, work, and mostly travel where T-Mobile 4G LTE coverage is good. Programs like Waze are much better now at dealing with networks like T-Mobile where speeds can go from 4G LTE to no coverage within ten miles by behaving like you would expect. I used to have problems with apps thinking that everywhere the app is being used the bandwidth will be the same, or the developer naively assuming that their offices in Silicon Valley have similar coverage to places like rural Illinois.
To summarize, if you are a rural user, do not use T-Mobile. If you are a(n) (sub)urban and cost sensitive user like me, go with T-Mobile. You won't always get good coverage in rural areas, but you can at least store your pictures and videos and immediately crush the first 4G LTE tower you encounter once you get within range on your way home.
Finally someone with some sense on Slashdot. How insecure are people posting here that they have to cry every time a story comes up that references changing social etiquette norms, especially in public circumstances? The exercise was word association. The woman associated T-mobile with "ghetto", and the implication was clearly that it was meant to be derogatory, in the sense that it's bad to be associated with a ghetto. Many people are forced to live in what have traditionally been called ghettos, this does not reflect who they are as people but the association with "ghetto" impacts their life in negative ways, from financial and social hardship to just feeling shitty. Commercials like this normalize this association in our culture and imply that the effect is neglible. This further hurts the people already affected by the association because it basically says that their negative experience with the association doesn't matter. Now, you can be an asshole all you want in private, that's fine if that's what it takes to make you feel better about yourself. But in the public domain, when your thoughts may be heard by anyone, have a little consideration about the actual effects of what your dumb ass wants to say. I swear reading all these comments on Slashdot complaining about PC culture, I feel like you all are a second away from killing yourselves because you can't handle the notion that social norms can be hurtful to others. tl;dr thank you, poster above me, for having some damn sense
But no...everyone has to attach a racist tag to it.
Well, that is sort of the origin of the word: a segregated neighborhood of the city. Usually jews, but more recently for black neighborhoods in the US. They don't even have to be all impoverished but generally are as groups that have economic power usually aren't force to live someplace. To somebody that's never been told where they have to live, it might have a more generally meaning, but as that red-lining is still going on, it might have different meaning to those who actually have to live there.
The broad definition of the word isn't "the poorest part of a city" - it actually means the area of a city that is set aside for a minority, and carries some connotations of that place being poor. People aren't just attaching a racist tag to it; the very definition of the word is inseparable from race. The fact that you think "ghetto" simply means a "poor area" suggests that you've been exposed to a lot of casual racism in your life, and you haven't noticed.
For example, during the Nazi era, the Jews were gathered into ghettoes. They weren't called ghettoes because they were poor, they were called that because they were areas that were set aside for Jews.
When I was in high school, a lot of kids would say "that's gay" to refer to anything they didn't like in general - imagine if the woman in the ad had called T-Mobile "gay"! It's similarly offensive to people who actually live in ghettoes, or are part of races that have historically been forced into ghettoes.