Wal-Mart is getting in on the prepaid craze. With AT&T offering a unlimited talk and text plan for $60 per month, someone had to come around and step up their game.

Wal-Mart is starting up it’s own “Straight Talk” service that will ride off of TracFone’s service. The service starts at just $30 per month and a user can get unlimited talk, text AND DATA for $45 per month.

The service goes on sale starting October 18th. It will offer not only nationwide coverage, but it will also offer unlimited 411 usage.

Of course, like most other prepaid carriers, the phone options will be quite limited. You won’t see any cutting edge phones avaiable for purchase on any of these types of services. That probably has something to do with how cheap the plans plus data are. If everyone had an iPhone or another more advanced phone on the plan, then it would eat data and Wal-Mart would likely be losing money. However, with the not-as-advanced phones, these are great options for text-happy teenagers.

With prepaid plans like these popping up, I can definitely see post paid plans taking a hit. These aren’t just regional plans, they are nationwide plans with great coverage. For example AT&T is one of the only carriers that have coverage at my parent’s house in rural Mississippi. I was completely in the dark when I had T-Mobile and went to visit them.

I would like to see more competition with post-paid plans because that’s where the more desirable phones are. That’s what I’m after in the end…I want good coverage and a great phone for a reasonable price. That’s why I’m with Sprint. The price really overcame the company’s phone selection and the coverage is awesome when compared to the T-Mobile phone I had previously.

Would you switch from your post paid plan to a prepaid plan to get in on the deals? How about you prepaid plan people…How do you like your service? How much does a more advanced phone matter to you?

What have you done to be more environmentally conscious?

Question:

Being environmentally conscious is something that I have talked about more than a time or two on this blog. What are some of the ways that you’re doing your part to help the earth?

Answer:

Personally, I should be doing more, but the things I have done are putting CFL lights in my house, recycling plastics, not purchasing plastics that can’t be recycled whenever possible, reusing containers from restaurants rather than just throwing them away, driving less, and using less electricity whenever I can.

Another thing I do, because it can be a hassle to recycle every single plastic bag I get from the store is, if I forget my reusable bags, I will not get a plastic bag, especially if it is just a couple of items.

A disruption in the refinery of crude oil into gasoline due to a fire in a Los Angeles area refinery couldn’t even raise the price of oil and gasoline. For the first time in two months the price of a gallon of gas has fallen below $2.50 on average. Where I live, I just paid $2.38 for a gallon of regular 87 octane.

The fire at the Tesoro refinery in LA will probably effect the price of gas in California, but not too much anywhere else. The refinery processed around 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day and produced gasoline, jet fuel, and other products.

Demand for gasoline is so low that according to analyst and trader Stephen Schork, “a material disruption to supply to one of the largest markets in the world barely registered with speculators on the NYMEX.”

Wholesale gasoline for October actually increased 1.2 cents to $1.6323 per gallon today while benchmark crude for November delivery increased nearly 50 cents to $66.51 per barrel, this is after increasing 13 cents on Friday.

Prices have actually been increasing ever since Iran announced that it had a secret nuclear program at the G20 summit last week. This is due to the fact that 20 percent of the crude oil in the world is trafficked through the Straits of Hormuz which is on the southern coast of Iran. If something were to actually happen between the United States (or any country) and Iran, that route would be compromised  and oil would likely spike.

Of course, oil is one of the indicators of the economy. There are so many indicators and this is definitely one of them. After all, it’s oil that took a dive when people started realizing how bad the economy was last year. Oil also has started creeping back up and analysts are saying that other things are creeping up as well; such as the sale of homes and autos.

While it would be a good thing to not have to see oil reach the outrageous prices it hit last summer, I really want the economy to start picking up soon. Perhaps when it comes time for Chris and I to leave our college town, I’ll be able to land a real marketing job somewhere.

Source

No related posts.