Today, let me elaborate on the minute sellers. Consider the following context. You have an expensive cellphone contract (paying a monthly amount for a certain number of hours/minutes of mobile phones), or have a pre-paid mobile with unfair fees. You're a busy person and need or like to talk a lot. Sometimes you need to make urgent phone calls to mobile numbers. And you move around. Using time not included in your contract is not really an option as it would be much more expensive than the rate that your contract includes. Calling to a mobile from any fixed phone around is simply prohibitively expensive (in any case, finding a fixed phone in which calls to mobiles are not blocked is not easy). What do you do? In Colombia, the answer is very simple: you go to a minute seller. Yes, almost in every corner we have people that can sell you time on a cellphone. They sell minutes. Not only: they have extremely competitive prices, surely lower than the price of additional minutes your carrier provides (or than the price of any prepaid card).
Minute sellers are easy to recognize: they usually have distinctive vests, in which the rate of the minute is painted on. Their job is easy: all they need to do is to stand in some busy corner all day long, carrying five or six cellphones with them. They wait for their customers. Nowadays, you can 'buy a minute' for as low as 200 pesos (0.082 euro); the rate is the same for all national and international numbers.
Where is the business? Easy. Someone bought hundreds or thousands of cellphones at the same time, and got a great corporative deal not available to anyone: those phones will come with the lowest rates in the market, with unlimited amount of minutes and SMSs. Some sort of privileged, large-scale contract. That person then hires people that 'manage' such phones. He makes lots of money and gives his 'sales representatives' convenient shares on the minutes they sell during the day.
When this thing first started (some years ago already) the cellphone companies complained; they were losing lots of money. It turns out that, according to the law, there's nothing illegal about selling minutes on the street. And forbidding it would have created a significant social problem, because of all the 'minute sellers' that would have been suddenly unemployed. How about that?
Next in this section: the bus synchronizer and the parking assistant.
1 comment:
Indeed! How about that? This is an excellent post my friend. One of the most interesting you've written.
In Bolivia, you buy a cell phone, and then a subscription. The subscription will cost you around 15 Euros and is a one-time cost. With it you get a reasonable amount of "talking time".
When you've used up the pre-paid time you just go to one of the many kiosks on the streets and buy some more time -- it costs a mere 15 Euros and then you get hours (I forget how many) of "talking time".
Local calls are very cheap, but calls to other regions are not so cheap and for calls abroad you'll want to use Skype or a "phone center" with landlines.
What impresses me about the system is that you're not bound by any rigid, expensive subscription. Sure, you have committed to a particular carrier, but you can just change that whenever you want, with the 15 Euros overhead.
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