Sprint’s best customers are hanging up May 12, 2008
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Fortune | May 12, 2008
By Michal Lev-Ram
Churn, or the rate at which customers defect to rival carriers, is one of the most important metrics for measuring the success of a wireless carrier.
Unfortunately for Sprint (S), it has one of the industry’s worst churn rates. On Monday it revealed that 1.09 million of its subscribers decided to take their business elsewhere in the first quarter as the company reported a net loss of $505 million, or 18 cents a share, compared to a loss of $211 million, or 7 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue dropped 8% from a year ago to $9.33 billion. Excluding a number of one-time charges, such as job-cut costs and merger-related expenses, Sprint’s adjusted profit slid to 4 cents a share from 19 cents a year ago.
Meanwhile, rivals Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T) and T-Mobile (DK) saw their churn rates for postpaid accounts fall during the same period, and their customer base grow. Verizon added 1.5 million wireless subscribers, and 1.3 million new customers signed up with AT&T. Even T-Mobile, the smallest of the top four U.S. carriers, added nearly a million customers the last quarter, tipping its total subscriber base to slightly over 30 million for the first time.
Many of Sprint’s recently-departed subscribers also happen to be some of its best customers. That means that a large percentage of defecting Sprint users are the type of people likely to pay for higher-priced data plans, pay extra fees for text messaging and downloading ringtones or buy more expensive phones. That is a big part of the reason Sprint’s average revenue per customer declined by about $2 compared to the first quarter of 2007.
“We continue to place the highest priority on reducing churn by improving the customer experience,” CEO Dan Hesse said in a statement Monday.
He told analysts on a conference call Monday that he is investing to acquire new customers as well as to keep existing ones from fleeing.
Improving customer service and simplifying rate plans are two ways Sprint is trying to keep retain subscribers. Later this summer, the company will also launch an iPhone competitor it hopes will provide an incentive for customers to stay – current customers, as opposed to new subscribers, will have first dibs on a Samsung touchscreen called the Instinct.
But it will likely be some time before those changes turn around Sprint’s churn rate. Hesse, however, is optimistic. On Monday he told analysts that in March, “We began to see improving trends in churn.”
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Two years ago, I called Sprint to cancel my Nextel service. Sprint’s customer service people insisted on my account number and the amount of my most recent bill. I was belligerant but they would not budge. I finally called the CEO’s office and somebody took care of it.
I’ve sworn off Sprint. But…if they get their act together I might be willing to give them another chance. Fool me twice…?
Trapped by 842% interest rate Web loan May 12, 2008
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“It’s insane. It is growing like wildfire,” said Henry Coffey, a Baltimore-based stock analyst who tracks the payday loan industry. One factor in the growth of online loans, which charge as much as 2,000 percent interest, is that they effectively hook borrowers into cycles of debt, often forcing people to take second and third loans to cover ballooning debts.”If you are paying over 1,800 percent interest, you will never get out of that debt,” said Elizabeth Schomburg, an official with Family Credit Managing Services, a Rockford-based credit counseling agency. Nonetheless, she said she has seen borrowers try to beat the odds and take out “three, five, six or eight loans.”
Bandit signs clutter our highways April 22, 2008
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Awhile back I posted an article about the Sign Bandit, a New Hampshire resident who made it his cause to remove this clutter from his neighborhood. Now that I’m more aware of the issue, I notice bandit signs everywhere I drive.
Web sites post suggestions about buying and displaying bandit signs. One company has made a business of installing these signs for you!
Another web site advertises “the sign hammer,” (pictured) for $39.95. It appears to be made of pvc plumbing components; the “business end” is an iron pipe cap threaded onto the elbow. I assume they install a magnet to the inside of the pipe cap so you can drive a roofing nail into the telephone pole. The idea is to hang the sign so it is out of reach of those who want to pull it down.
Bandit signs are illegal in most — if not all — localities. But it also may be illegal for you to pull them down. Some communities, such as San Antonio, Texas, encourage citizens to report these signs when they see them.
What if all of us became vigilante bandit sign “bandits,” removing and destroying every illegal sign we see? Something needs to be done or this problem will continue to proliferate.
If you decide to become a bandit sign “bandit,” be sure you do it quietly, and don’t advertise your activities.
Happy Hunting!
Removing bandit signs from our highways April 3, 2008
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Free The Sign Bandit!
John Phillips | Car and Driver | May 2008
For years, I’ve noticed tacky roadside signs near my home. They’re those cheap stick-in-the-ground types, held up by flimsy metal rods. They advertise all manner of nonsense. One screams, “WE PAY YOU TO LOSE WEIGHT!!!” Another boasts, “EARN $10,000 PER MONTH…AT HOME!!!”
I live where I live because it’s scenic, and these signs represent gratuitous visual clutter. Eventually, I worked myself into a dandy little snit and ripped one of the offenders out of the ground. I carried it home and tossed it in the trash. But I felt a little guilty.
My guilt has now passed.
That’s because of the so-called sign bandit, 53-year-old John Decker, a resident of Stratham, New Hampshire. Like me, Decker began uprooting commercial signs during his commute. Unlike me, he wound up with several hundred of the things.
“On one nearby highway alone,” he says, “I counted 150 signs. I said, ‘Come on, this is just litter. It’s offensive.'” He told a local reporter, “It’s like someone taking a crap on your lawn every day.”
If you think Decker might be a whack job, think again. In fact, he’s one of us, a car guy who majored in automotive technology, then worked for Eric Broadley at Lola. He has owned two Formula Fords and occasionally writes a car-repair column for Popular Mechanics.
“I looked into the matter,” Decker says,”and learned that the strip between the road and the telephone poles is a public right-of-way. It’s maintained by state or municipal governments — they mow it, for instance. Which means taxpayers pay for that land. It isn’t a place where I can dump my trash. So why can a guy who’s advertising discount hot tubs leave his trash there?”
Decker called the New Hampshire Department of Public Works. “They told me, ‘Well, we can’t take down the signs-we don’t have the money or manpower. But we don’t care if you do.'”
Decker thus embarked on a sign-eradication bender and almost immediately got an earful from the hot-tub guy. “Man, was he furious,” Decker recalls. “But I told him I wasn’t going to stop. I said, “Look, your junky signs cost at least $3 apiece, and I’ve taken down 400 of them, so you’ve lost $1200. Why don’t you quit putting them up, save yourself some money?’ But he just kept screaming, saying he was calling the cops.”
Which is exactly what he did. “When the Portsmouth police contacted me,” recalls Decker, “they said, ‘You gotta give back that guy’s signs.’ I said, ‘Me? No way. Not a chance.'”
And that’s when a warrant was issued for Decker’s arrest.
The cops arrived at his home at 10 p.m. on August 10, 2006. They arrested him in his kitchen and placed him in handcuffs. “When I asked why they couldn’t have come during the day,” he remembers, “they said it was to avoid a whole ‘horse-and-pony show.’ I was gonna say, ‘I think there’s supposed to be a canine in there,’ but I didn’t. When we got outside, their cruiser had a flat tire. I offered to fix it with my air compressor, but they said, ‘No, we’ll just call for another cruiser.’ I said, ‘Okay, fine, let’s do the whole perp walk.’ ”
On April 9, 2007, Decker went to court. His defense, basically, was that the state had encouraged him to remove the signs. Moreover, he argued, anything abandoned by the side of the road is litter. “It’s like soda cans thrown out of car windows,” he offered. “And if someone comes along and picks up those cans to recycle them or whatever, we all say, ‘Good for you, thanks for helping out.’ Why are junk signs any different?”
The prosecutor’s answer was that, absent a state law specifying the signs as litter, they technically belonged to, well, someone. Decker was charged with a Class B misdemeanor and fined $350. “They said I was guilty of ‘theft by unauthorized taking,'” he recalls. “I said,’Excuse me, but isn’t that redundant?’ Actually, I was hoping my punishment would be community service. That way, they’d make me pick up litter and I could grab more signs!”
By then, Decker was officially a scofflaw, so he had no compunction about striking again. “What happened was I saw these metal signs for a doll-and-stuffed-bear show,” he says, “and they were nailed to telephone poles. So I pried them off with a crow bar. The next morning, I called the police and said, ‘Look, I have some more signs, but this time I’m gonna bring them to you. That’s not stealing. I’m just relocating them.'”
Another warrant was issued for Decker’s arrest. The fine this time was only $250.
“That’s when I began developing a following among locals,” he says. “In fact, they gave me an award for ‘community courage.'” Better still, a New Hampshire Democratic state representative introduced legislation to make it illegal to post commercial ads on public easements. It should come up for a vote in late April.
“Meanwhile,” Decker says, “I’ve created a Web site [signbanditnh.org], and I’m selling three-by-eight-inch decals for 30 cents apiece. They say LITTER! and I’ve got people pasting them on whatever crappy roadside signs that pop up. I pasted one on a landscaper’s sign, and right away the guy showed up in my driveway, screaming. So now I’ve got all these angry sign guys coming around at night, busting up my mailbox, and they once filled it with Cheez Whiz. I said to my wife, ‘I feel like I’m fighting 11-year-olds.'”
For my part, I’ve gone ahead and purchased a stack of LITTER! decals. I’m perfectly willing to sacrifice my mailbox in return for a more bucolic commute. Plus, I really like Cheez Whiz.
Million-dollar home for Obama’s ex-pastor March 30, 2008
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Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago church is buying a $1 million home for its controversial retired pastor who has become a central figure in the Democratic presidential race, records show.
The 10,000-square-foot home in South suburan Tinley Park features four bedrooms, an elevator, an exercise room and a four-car garage, according to building plans reviewed by the SouthtownStar.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who retired from Trinity United Church of Christ last month, purchased the land in 2004 for $345,000, according to property records reviewed by The Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune.
He sold the land to the church two years later, which took out a $1.6 million mortgage on the property and is now listed as the land owner.
Trinity authorities declined to comment Saturday.
But a spokesman for the church’s national headquarters said it is “customary and appropriate” to provide housing for retired clergy, especially those who have served the church for many years.
“Each local UCC congregation is free to honor a retiring pastor in ways it feels most appropriate to address the needs of that clergyperson’s circumstances,” according to a prepared statement by Rev. J. Bennett Guess.
Wright, 66, remains a senior pastor at Trinity — a large and vibrant black church on Chicago’s South Side.
He officiated at Obama’s wedding and was the Illinois senator’s spiritual mentor for years, but has become a recent thorn in the side of the Democratic campaign after videos circulated of the pastor condemning the U.S. government for allegedly racist and genocidal acts.
Obama condemned remarks from Wright, but he did not leave the church or repudiate the minister himself, who he said was like a family member.
World’s ugliest Dunkin’ March 5, 2008
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The world’s ugliest Dunkin’ Donuts appeared in Waukegan recently.
Apparently somebody thought this was attractive. But who?
Stop the madness! February 25, 2008
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In the fall of 1975 I took up residence in Louisville, Kentucky. Memories from that era include traffic that meandered through the streets as if time was standing still; Angie Umphrey (really Humphrey, but when she pronounced it the “H” was silent), a local weather reporter did commercials for Big O Tires; reports of bank robberies were a staple on the nightly news.
Across the street from the office where I worked was a bar called “Babe’s.” We often gathered there after work, as did football legend Paul Hornung — he always sat at the bar with a blonde babe on his lap.
Thursday night was wet t-shirt contest at Babe’s; Wolfman Jack even hosted one of the galas (he was shorter in person).
Everywhere I’d go, when introduced as Mel Metts, someone would ask, “Any kin to Milton?”
And Louisville was in the national spotlight because Humana Hospital had installed one of the early artificial hearts known as the Jarvik-7, invented by researcher Robert Jarvik and Dr. William DeVries. I say “installed,” because the heart was a blood-pump that operated outside the body, and it wasn’t until 1982 that the Jarvic heart was inserted into a human body.
Fast-forward to 2006, when Dr. Robert Jarvik began touting Lipitor in television commercials. Then fast-forward to today, when Phizer Parmaceuticals agreed to pull those ads from tv, in response to criticism that Robert Jarvik — not a medical doctor — created the false impression (in the ads) that he is a licensed M.D. Who knew? In this report, a congressional committee believes that Phizer may have used a body double in some ads.
In this article, Mike Adams questions the ethics of pharmaceutical commercials:
“Television drug ads engage in such blatant deceptions and exaggerations that even the medical journals are starting to condemn the practice. This week, the Annals of Family Medicine published an analysis of popular drug advertisements that concluded the ads essentially lie to the public about the benefits of pharmaceuticals while utterly ignoring alternative health strategies like dietary or lifestyle changes.
“The advertising practices of drug companies are so outrageous that even David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, penned an editorial condemning them. In fact, Kessler says television ads never should have been allowed by the FDA in the first place (the FDA legalized drug ads in late 1997, after Kessler left his position there). Today, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to allow drug ads on television.”
And that’s my point. Commercials for pharmaceuticals do not add value, only cost as huge advertising bugets are factored into the retail pricing of these drugs. The FDA erred in 1997 when they began allowing these commercials, and the error needs to be corrected.
You can’t even protect your children from these ads describing erectile dysfunction (“Daddy, what is erectile dysfunction?”) and other disorders best screened from the minds of our young’uns.
Stop the madness. End these commercials!
FREE GIFT INSIDE! OPEN NOW! February 17, 2008
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Staples and Office Depot used to be on my list of favorites, but Office Depot is quickly losing status.
Twice recently I have received false advertising in the form of an envelope. Emblazoned on the outside are the words
FREE
GIFT INSIDE!
OPEN NOW!
But inside, there is no gift. Instead there is a catalog. The inside cover says, “Choose your Free Gift!
with your delivery order of $100 or more!
See page 3 for redemption details.”
This is blatantly misleading, and, if it isn’t illegal, it should be.
Office Depot, you are quickly dropping to the ranks of OfficeMax, whom I detest!
Damn lazy Realtors! February 15, 2008
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I view dozens of Multiple Listing sheets every day, and it amazes me that so many members of my species (real estate agents) can be so inept. I mean, how can they create half-assed listings and believe they are doing the best job for their clients?
I hate seeing this:
Here in the 21st Century, the MLS has this cool feature that allows the agents to upload their own listing photos. Immediately. Pronto. On the spot!
Yet, on some listings, the placeholder shown above appears on listings that are 30, 60, 90 days old, and longer!
Sellers, why do you allow your so-called Real Estate Professional to get away with this? Don’t put up with this crap! Demand service.
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