28 March 2009

Large/Blended Families vs Wireless Service

My current dilemma concerns my cell phone provider. They conveniently offer to group up to 5 members of my family in a single plan. Marvelous, except my current blended family has a husband, wife, 2 of her kids and 3 of mine. Advanced calculus yields an apparently unworkable 7 cell phone users. That’s 2 more than the plan maximum. That’s my dilemma. When I was making more money and had higher expectations of keeping my job and income level, this problem was way low down on my dilemma list but now that the economy sucks and we’re all counting our pennies, I’d like some consideration here. I’ve tried to reason with my monolithic cell phone corporation complaining that their plan maximum count is too low. This, unsurprisingly, got me nowhere. They were nice enough to split us up according to text usage. Mad texters on one plan and reasonable texters on the other. This helped some but that still left me with 2 plans and a sizeable extra chunk of change to pay every month. Switch providers you say. Good idea but wait, they ALL have that magic 5 line maximum. Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and Nex-Tel all have family plans that max out at 5 lines. I smell a rat but that’s another story. Times are tough and if one of these large customer hungry cell providers wants a really big, obvious marketing tip, raise your family plan maximum line count. Please don’t raise the associated rates please because that would just piss me off. Just raise the number of lines to 8 or 10 to accommodate all the blended, cell-addicted families out there. This could be a big opportunity to suck a lot of large families into your customer list. Once there, you know the prospect of switching providers is daunting so we’ll probably stay. Act now while I can still afford one cell phone plan.