The problem is that I’m not a heavy cell phone user. There’s no need for me to walk around like an escapee from a Star Trek convention with a Borg device surgically attached to my ear. (Har, har, like no one’s heard THAT joke before.) It’s bad enough that I’m connected to a computer most of the time. I don’t need a cell phone to check email, send IM messages, surf the web, or do anything that will sink me further in a technological lifestyle. I also don’t need to take pictures, play music or do a lot of those fancy things that make so many people flip their phones at the thought of the latest features of the newest generation of cell phones. It’s just nice to be able to make or receive phone calls, to have some avenue of contact in case of emergency or convenience.
Thus, I’m not into phone plans with supermegagillions of minutes. I just want a simple phone that makes calls. Which brings me to these pay-as-you-go plans, none of which seem to truly be pay-as-you-go. They are contract-free, which is a kind of pay-as-you-go. They are also pre-paid. So you can spend according to what money you have. That’s all peachy. But…
Net10 offers a comparison of plans, all to tout their own $0.10 a minute costs with no additional fees. No monthly fee. No $1 fee on days the cell phone is used. Yet, and the catch is pretty common, minutes that are pre-purchased expire. You only get to roll over your minutes if you buy more minutes. In the case of Net10, you buy, say, 300 minutes/60 days of service, which means your service ends when you use up those 300 minutes or you hit 60 days, whichever comes first. So what happens if you hit 60 days and you haven’t used those 300 minutes? Well, ducky, those minutes go bye-bye. While I may be wrong – that fine print sure is hard to read – just about all those pre-paid plans come with a limited shelf life – minutes only roll over if you “top off.” Translation: Pay-as-you-go means you have to keep paying whether you go or not, although you’re free to stop at any time. What about paying for X number of minutes…and having those minutes ready whether you use them up quickly or slowly? I can understand a time limit, maybe, like a year or so. But Virgin Mobile’s 30-day limit, for example, is rather strict. The name of the game, it seems, is to overpay for options and features, a situation made all the more insulting when considering that services like text messaging actually don’t cost carriers anything. Perhaps Metro PCS has the most honest contract-free plan.
The Bend Over Policy
All I can think of is that cell phone carriers embody the same bend-over-here-it-comes-again policy that has worked such wonders for the cable companies. Trying to find an honest cell phone plan that is truly tailored to one’s needs is a bit like trying to get a la carte options for your cable TV so you can watch the channels you want to watch instead of paying for the channel you want and getting the bonus of dozens of channels you wouldn’t be caught alive watching. It’s as if the entire business is predicated on overpaying, with the companies making profit on the expectation that you won’t take full advantage of whatever plan you sign up for. Profiteering isn’t so far-fetched a charge. Consider how text messages, which we pay to send AND receive, are nothing more than a big fat scam. As a piece in The New York Times recently discussed, it costs carriers virtually nothing to transmit text messages. Yet they’ve increased their prices in the past years and, as I’ve mentioned, you have to pay to receive them. I just have to wonder about a system that could, in principle, allow double-charging: Someone pays to send a text message on a network and another, on that same network, pays to receive it? Does this happen? Isn’t this double-dipping?
In this maze of plans and numbers, fine print and options both wanted and gratuitous, what ever happened to the straightforward deal? Where is the spirit of commerce, two people engaged in a fair deal, that isn’t tainted by the exploitation that infects capitalism?
It’s customary to write a column and speculate about answers to thorny questions. But, I’m sorry to say, questions are all I have this week. Now, shall we talk about AIG?
Frédérik invites you to discuss this week’s column and more at his blog.