This seems more likely to me. In 2003 (or thereabouts), long before the iPhone, there was this big untapped market for cell phones. A lot of people didn’t think they needed one (maybe they still had their pagers and thought that was fine. There were pay phones!)
So the corporations selling cell phones were small and scrappy and putting stores in strip malls still seemed like the best way to get customers. And they were willing to be patient about low-traffic stores. As you said, the manager made himself (probably) look good by having a map that was covered with stores.
I still think it’s about Nebraska, and that Kim’s wandering about was a search for some other professional path that would let her quit Mesa Verde. She knows that if she stays with them, she’ll eventually be sent to Nebraska.
But that’s another reason why it would make a great money laundering operation. It’s a new industry, with expected high growth, and largely unregulated. For people constantly looking for ways to clean millions of dollars, such a new, cash-based industry would be a god send. Get in early, before the cops figure out how much a cell phone store should be making, month to month.
I just don’t see any reason to think it is a money laundering operation. First of all, the store is totally empty. Secondly, if you’re running a money laundering operation you don’t hire random guys to run the store off a phone interview. Thirdly, that just seems like lazy plotting on the part of the writing staff.
Plus, I’m not sure what would be “lazy” about this.
We know there’s a lot of money laundering businesses in the BB universe. We know that Saul was involved in a lot of them. He had to get an intro into that from somewhere. We also know he met up with Fring at some point, so maybe this is it. We know Fring looks for talent, and if Saul spots the laundering operation, Fring is more likely to recruit him than to kill him.
We also know that in BB, there was the episode where Walt spotted the other meth cookers in the Home Depot, based on what they were buying. Being able to spot The Other Criminal is established as part of the “badass” grade for BB characters. So why not Saul?
One thing I’m sure of is that the creators have a lot of themes running through their work, and this fits the theme.
Leave my face out of it—I still think it’s a good possibility!
It’s funny you say that, because although I can see where you could argue that, Vince Gilligan just explicitly denounced that “rule”, and TV writers who use it, on the insider podcast (last week’s, I believe).
Maybe, but were cell phone monthly contracts likely to be paid in cash? (In 2003 or any other year?) I’m guessing that people would have been more likely to use credit cards–even that the contract would require a credit card.
For money laundering, you want a business in which it’s expected that most of your customers will pay in cash.
And that fact is likely to lead to plot holes–even the BB car wash was a bit iffy, because in the 21st century, a lot of customers would have been much more likely to pull out the plastic to pay for that wash and detailing. (But we ignored that likelihood because we loved the writing of BB, overall.)
I think you’re right to speculate that at some point, Jimmy/Saul really will start focusing on money laundering as a business ‘opportunity.’ Maybe considering the cell phone biz as a possibility will start him on the path of looking for more-reliably cash-based enterprises.
only seen bits and pieces of this show … but in 2003 if you wanted to have an all cash cell phone biz all you had to do is Set up a store in the questionable part of town and sell 40 dollar disposable phones that run on prepaid cards
because until they started putting the welfare benefits on the cards that was all untraceable cash…
I lived near a bill payment place that cashed welfare checks and they started selling phones like that and they were so popular theyd ask if they just wanted to take the card fee out of the check …… only reason anyone noticed anything was all of a sudden the narc units noticed none of the dealers had traceable phones anymore …….
Also, regarding the cell phone business, rather than a money laundering operation, I see it as Jimmy’s introduction to the Criminal Element. These guys will be his primary customers, right? The only way that they would be more likely to line up at his door is if he were a Criminal Attorney. This may be the start of his taking over for the Vet.
Yeah, a monthly contract would involve credit cards or bank auto payments. That’s why I suggested “pay as you go” phones. Did you have those in the US? They were pretty common here in Canada. You’d buy a certain number of talking minutes/text messages, and “top up” your minutes whenever you ran low. It was aimed at low income users who couldn’t guarantee a regular monthly payment; they’d budget their cell phone usage like any other expense. You could drop by the store and pay cash for new minutes whenever you had a few extra bucks.
Of course, like most things aimed at poor people, it actually kind of screwed them, since the cost per minute was usually higher than the monthly plans. But it gave you more flexibility.
I don’t think there’s anything shady going on except for Jimmy’s own dealings, which he’s got pretty well figured out. If nothing else, if it’s a money laundering front they hired a horrible person for the job of ‘just sit around and don’t draw attention to yourself’, and there should be plenty of stoners and aspiring screenwriters and such that would be happy to just sit in a store all day, handle the rare customer, and not ask too many questions. Jimmy’s bombastic interview persona would be a bad idea to bring in for peace and quiet.
How do we know that Saul met up with Fring (other than the failed spy routine he did for Mike a while back)? On the Breaking Bad side he worked with his own guys and occasionally Mike, not Gus, and didn’t do anything to indicate that he even knew who Fring was until Walt dragged him into it. It’s not impossible that he has some unmentioned direct tie to Fring (and I’m sure he’s defended some street level guys who work for Fring), but I don’t recall anything in BB that would indicate that Saul was recruited by Gus for any purpose, or that he had a real idea who Gus was early on.
The southwest has hundreds of miles of desert roads that get little regular traffic. If you really wanted to be sure, set cars a few of miles down the road either way to warn if you someone starts driving down the road, but most of the time there just isn’t going to be anyone around on some roads, especially if you pick the five minute window to shoot the car reasonably well. They show a lot of shots of people driving as the only car on the road within the show to establish this too.
In a bad area, especially one that’s not technically in town, I’d be surprised to see cops showing up inside of 30 minutes. The neighbors probably aren’t going to call 911 right away for gunfire since that’s pretty hazardous to your health, and police response times are generally pretty slow. Average response time for a SWAT team in the US is 50 minutes, so about the length of the whole episode (in real time) not just the firefight. Here’s an article about some bad police response times that gives an idea, one example in New Orleans took 17 minutes for cops to respond to gunmen shooting in an upscale area.
I think people are vastly overestimating police response time and vastly underestimating how empty a lot of the Southwest is.
It sounds ideal to me! Well, as long as they have a comfortable chair to sit in, and I could wear headphones to drown out the execrable Muzak they were playing.
It’s not clear if he knew exactly who Gus was. But he is the one who connected Walt with Gus.
Agreed. When I lived in a small city (20,000 residents) in a rural part of Missouri, friends and family from the Northeast or West Coast would visit and marvel at how thinly populated it was once you got outside of town. And they had a point, to a degree: it was more than fifty miles to the nearest interstate or any other city with more than 5,000 residents, and nearly a hundred miles to the nearest city with more than 50,000. But on the other hand, if you went driving around on country roads in Missouri, you would rarely find yourself in a spot where you couldn’t see a building (not even a shed) in any direction. There were still farmhouses and small towns scattered continuously through the countryside. Whereas once you get further west than eastern Kansas/Nebraska/SD/ND, and before you get to the actual coast, that whole region is REALLY empty outside of a few isolated metro areas. The entire Mountain Time Zone has barely more people in it than the state of Florida, and half of those people live in the Denver, Phoenix, or Salt Lake City metros.
They still have such things here in the U.S., and in fact I’m posting this from a pay-as-you-go phone, as my wife and I have used Page Plus Cellular for years (it uses the Verizon network). We do actually have monthly plans, though. It’s just that you have to pay for the month before it starts, and if you don’t pay for the next month before the current one ends, your phone instantly stops working (they do send you texts to warn you a week, three days, and one day out). And although it would make sense for it to be more expensive, I actually find that it’s surprisingly cheaper than any contract deal I’ve seen.
We actually have a credit card registered with Page Plus that we use to buy our monthly “minutes”, so it’s not really anonymous. But we used to use Virgin Mobile, and with them we’d pay cash for “top up” cards they sold in convenience stores.
A few years ago I was travelling home from Moab UT to Portland OR–I turned north at Winnemucca NV on highway 95 and I thought that was a pretty empty stretch of road, then I turned off on Highway 78 to head toward Burns. It was about seventy miles on a nicely paved and maintained road with absolutely nothing out there. No phone poles, no fences, no buildings, no side roads, nothing. In that seventy miles I saw exactly three cars. One was parked and empty off the side of the road. The other two were within two miles of my destination, Crystal Crane Hot Springs outside Burns. I could have set up a firing range for freaking RPGs out there and blown up fifteen dozen grenades and nobody would ever have known. The western half of the US is freaking enormous, much of it is very sparsely populated and long stretches of it have no people in them. Harney County in Oregon has a population density of less than one person per square mile.
It was clear on BB that Saul didn’t know Fring directly, or at least didn’t know that he was the big meth kingpin instead of the owner of Pollos Hermanos. When he brought him up to Walt it was as “I know a guy who knows a guy” (Sorry about the Spongebob clip after.) I think later in the episode he tells Walt that he doesn’t have a direct contact with Fring. He says something like “I didn’t call him. My guy called another guy who called him.”
Here in Michigan out on my bicycle on the roads between the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas, I’ll regularly be the only vehicle on the road during my entire use of it (up to an hour).
Given this is approximately 2003, seeing “datos ilimitados” prominently advertised in the store seemed like an anachronism to me. First, I’m not sure that it existed, but more importantly, I can’t imagine much of a market for it existed. Mobile web was pretty much dead, even for Palm OS devices.
Between Detroit and Ann Arbor, you say? Now this (unlike the story SmartAleq posted) does surprise me. Those are pretty heavily populated areas!
One does wonder why roads with such little use are paved and well-maintained. Out in the desert West, maybe they last forever with low usage? In which case it could make sense over the long run. But in Michigan, I’ve got to think the changing of the seasons would tear up the road even if it didn’t get much traffic, making it wasteful to maintain it.
For people who like looking ahead, apparently a TV station leaked episode titles and summaries for the rest of the season. They’re all just ‘TV guide’ level stuff and don’t give any specifics, but there are some interesting reveals.
[spoiler]S04E05 - Quite a Ride: Jimmy identifies a new market for his talents; Mike vets a potential partnership; Kim drives a hard bargain.
S04E06 - Piñata: While Jimmy daydreams about reconstituting Wexler-McGill, Kim sets out to secure her own future; Mike puts a plan into motion for Gus.
S04E07 - Something Stupid: Jimmy expands his business, but runs into a problem that only Kim can solve; Gus intervenes in Hector’s medical care; Mike deals with a setback.
S04E08 - Coushatta: Jimmy goes to great lengths to right a wrong, as Kim pulls out all the stops for a case; Mike lets his team blow off steam; Nacho receives a visitor.
S04E09 - Wiedersehen: Jimmy and Kim unburden themselves, risking their relationship in the process; Nacho is forced to make the rounds with Lalo; Mike has cause to worry.
S04E10 - Winner: Jimmy turns the page on his reputation; Lalo tracks a loose end in Gus’ operation; Mike is forced to make a difficult decision.[/SPOILER]
Didn’t Jimmy actually meet Gus earlier in BCS? He was doing some surveilling for Mike and threw something in the trash in a Pollos Hermaons store… but now I’ve forgotten the rest of the context.
