pocketmint

Text message insanity, part two

In part one, I discussed the rampant texting habits of teenagers today and the rapidly rising cost of same.

The deceptive part of the text messaging phenomenon is that the cost is discussed in terms of a nickel here, a dime there, which makes it seem trivial. It’s not.

Wireless providers are collecting forty cents (they double-bill, hitting both the sender and receiver) to transfer a few lines of text. Sam at Gthing did the math to put this into perspective: if your internet bandwidth were charged at the same rate as text messages, downloading a single MP3 would cost about $24,000.*

This is why SMS is worth 100 billion dollars a year, and growing exponentially.

So what if you’re not a teenager, and you’re trying to keep your cell phone bill from skyrocketing? Here are a few suggestions:

• Get a smaller plan and stick to it. $5 will get you 200 messages from AT&T, 250 messages from Verizon, 300 from Sprint, and 400 from T-Mobile.
• Use email to send texts for free (but remember that the receiver will still be charged). T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint offer free web interfaces as well.
• Switch to a smaller carrier with lower rates.

Smaller companies aren’t rushing to hike SMS rates as quickly as the Big Four. I sampled four, all of which had better per-message deals:

• Alltel charges 15¢ to send and receive domestic messages. Alltel is the only wireless carrier large enough to have been rated along with the Big Four in Consumer Reports’ last study, where they outranked every other carrier in the metro areas for which CR had adequate survey data.
• Virgin Mobile, while arguably not small, is definitely an underdog in the current US market. They offer domestic text messages for 10¢ each way, international for 20¢ sent and 10¢ received.
• US Cellular charges 20¢ to send, but received messages are free.
• Cellular South charges 15¢ to send and receive, capped per month at $30.

(Photo by bigdiesel.)

* Calculations assume the average text message is 80 characters (the range is 1-160) and the average song is about 4 megabytes.

Grocery bag revolution

I made a run to Safeway last night for sale produce: blueberries at $2.50/lb, tomatoes at $1.50/lb, summer squash and lettuce at $1.00. (I love summer.) At the checkout I put my nylon bag at the front of the conveyor belt, then unloaded my groceries.

The checker gingerly picked up the turquoise cloth and dropped it again as though it had slimed him. “What is this?”

I blinked. “It’s a bag? … For the …” I waved at the groceries.

He looked at it again. “Oh! Sorry.”

Bemused, I busied myself with the payment pad and watched the totals as he rang up the groceries. Corrected him on the type of lettuce (red leaf, which was on sale, rather than butter, which was not). Signed the electronic pad and moved down to pick up my groceries …

Which were packed into three plastic bags. Along with the nylon bag that I’d brought.

At this point, I snapped a little. “Um, the whole point here was to not use the plastic bags,” I growled at the bagger, while extricating my cloth bag.

“Oh! Sorry.” Together we repacked all three bags’ worth into my single reusable one. He tossed the plastic bags to the side and began packing new ones for the next customer, and I winced, realizing that my environmental diligence had resulted in zero effect.

To be fair, I’ve been exclusively bringing my own bags to the grocery for three months, and this is the first time I’ve been met with such utter incomprehension. I thought the timing was ironic, since yesterday the Seattle City Council approved a controversial twenty-cent disposable bag fee.

Starting January 1, shoppers will be charged twenty cents for every plastic or paper bag they carry out of a grocery or drug store. This news thrilled me.

That might seem like a contradiction — why would someone concerned with saving money support a new expense? — but it’s core to my philosophy. I love bargains but have never espoused Frugality Uber Alles; I have a vivid environmentalist streak and a strong compulsion to do the right thing.

But even that compulsion is not always enough to battle inertia. I’ve known for years that both plastic and paper bags pose environmental problems, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally got off my butt and purchased a functional alternative.

Many grocery stores already offer a few pennies’ rebate for bringing your own bag, but it’s not really enough to matter. (I was amused to note that I received three cents’ credit for bringing my one large bag, when apparently I was saving them three plastic bags.)

En masse, people are creatures of habit who aren’t motivated by long-term benefits. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. Most of us have to be given clear, short-term incentives to embrace change. And it works.

From the New York Times:

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

In six months, cloth bags will be the norm here in Seattle, not a weird exception that baffles grocery employees. I think that’s a huge victory, more than worth the expense.

(You can read details of the bag fee at the Seattle PI and Seattle Times.)

(Photo by taberandrew.)

Minimum wage gain and pain

Millions of Americans got a raise today. I am grateful to not be one of them.

I’ve worked for minimum wage. During and just after college, I waited tables in Texas where ‘tipped employees’ were paid just $2.13 an hour. That number hasn’t changed at all in the last twenty years, and guess what? Today’s federal wage increase doesn’t apply to them, so servers in 24 states are still making under $3 an hour.

And what you may not know, if you’ve never worked in a restaurant, is that waitstaff are required to do an hour or more of ‘sidework’ before and after each serving shift, for which they are still only paid $2.13. The tips you get (or don’t) during the few hours you’re actually waiting tables have to make up for the hours you spent mopping floors, filling condiments, and rolling silverware into napkins. And there are no guaranteed hours — if the restaurant isn’t busy enough, you’re told to do your sidework and go home, tipless. Add on some cut-throat restaurant politics and … there were plenty of days when I didn’t average the bare $4.25 per hour.

That sucked in 1993. Cost of living is 150% more expensive now. I don’t know how people stand it.

Best place to work in a restaurant? Right here in Washington State. Washington has long had the best minimum wage in the country (currently $8.07, indexed to inflation every January). And we’re one of just seven states that requires tipped employees to be paid the full minimum wage. California and Oregon are also good choices, at $8 and $7.95 respectively. West Coast, baby.

Earlier this week I watched the first episode of “30 Days,” in which Morgan Spurlock (of Super-Size Me) and his girlfriend Alex live for a month on minimum wage.

It’s a stunt, yes, but it’s a poignant stunt with a lot of truth to it, and if you’re making more than $10 per hour right now you should go and watch it. Really. I was nearly in tears when it was over. It’s so hard, and so unfair. And as he said at the end … they were two educated articulate white people without kids. So many people have it so much worse.

For me it was a good reminder that, as often as I am unhappy about some aspect of my job, there’s a whole league of problems that I have left behind, and another that I mercifully have never had.

(Photo by Scooter Flix.)

Text message insanity, part one

If you have a teen in your house, you’re likely already aware of what I’m about to tell you: this texting thing is way out of control.

We have a fifteen-year-old. Nearly every conversation Jak and I have with her involves a variation of the phrase, “Michaela, put your phone away and listen to me.” She can send five text messages in the time it takes me to utter half a sentence. Of course, you may have noticed that pithiness is not my strong suit, whereas her messages may be only five or six characters long and contain minimal semantic content. But still, the sheer volume is … impressive.

We didn’t buy her a cell phone. Jak and I discussed it, but I’d read a lot of stories about teens and their shockingly high texting bills. My position was that we could gift her a phone but she would first have to be prepared to pay her own phone bill — we weren’t going to add her to ours.

Unfortunately, this decision was trumped by grandparents, who provided Michaela with a cell phone and a line on their own plan. I cringed, but chose not to fight the fait accompli. Sure enough, she blew through her allotted 400 messages and started racking up the extra per-text charges to the tune of $50 per month. After a couple months of this, the grandparents put their foot down: control it or lose the phone.

I thought this would be a good time for Michaela to learn an economic lesson, but this was foiled again when she talked her mother into getting her a new, cooler phone and switching her to her mom’s plan. Mom, being at least one step ahead of the grandparents, signed Michaela up for unlimited text messaging, for which Michaela is supposed to reimburse her each month. I hear the reimbursement isn’t going so well, but at least she’s not racking up several dollars a day on overage.

Which brings us to this news: wireless companies have noticed the teen obsession with texting and are responding by … raising the price. When Michaela was spending about an extra $50 per month last year, that was at .10 per message. Since then Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon have all doubled their rates to .20. Now T-Mobile is quietly informing its customers that as of August 29, they will follow suit. Here’s a table comparing current rates (with T-Mobile’s upcoming increase indicated):

¹ Includes Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, & Virgin Islands

² Includes Canada

This doesn’t even cover photo and video messaging, which are invariably more expensive. If you have a teen on your shared plan, there’s really only one option: get a flat-rate unlimited text package. Here are the offerings from the Big Four wireless companies:

• Sprint: $20/month unlimited
• AT&T: $20/month unlimited
• Verizon doesn’t currently offer a true unlimited plan; for $20/month they’ll give you unlimited messages to other Verizon customers, and 5000 for everyone else. (If you can’t imagine anyone texting that much, you should read this article.)
• T-Mobile: $15/month unlimited. No official word yet on whether this will rise in August to $20 as well, but I would be shocked if it didn’t.

Of course, you could try to enforce a hard limit on text messages with your teen, but be prepared for a pitched battle if you do. If ours is any indication, the suggestion that one stop texting will be received much like the suggestion that one stop breathing.

In part two, I’ll discuss some options for those of us with more reasonable texting habits, along with some scary text message statistics.

(Photos by Sarah R and williamhartz.)

Double exposure: risks of working in the financial industry

If you have any money in the stock market right now, you’ve probably noticed a distressing trend over the past few months. I only check my retirement account balances once a month, and I can’t help being pained when the decline in net worth measures thousands of dollars.

Compounding this is the fact that, because I now work in the financial industry, the stock market also affects my income: my annual bonus is directly tied to the AUM held by my division of the company at the end of the year. When the stock market tanks like it is right now, the company loses millions of dollars in assets per month, and no amount of new sales can close the gap. It’s looking less and less likely that we will hit the magic number come 31 December. So in addition to my shrinking retirement accounts, I stand to lose thousands of dollars in income.

I happen to work for a bank that didn’t invest in sub-prime mortgages and is relatively unshaken by the ‘mortgage crisis’. But on days like today I think about all those poor people who work(ed) for Bear Stearns, or Freddie & Fannie, or IndyMac, or Washington Mutual, most of whom are in no way responsible for the mess we’re in. At least my base salary is relatively safe!

You may have heard warnings against keeping company stock in your 401(k) account or even investing too heavily in the same industry, because of the risk of double-exposure. Similarly, employment in the financial industry can expose your income to the same risks as your investments. It’s something that never occurred to me when I took this job, but it does bear considering.