AT&T (and by extension, pretty much ALL mobile phone carriers).
MIL, who is 83, and has limited access to transportation, has had a prepaid AT&T cell phone for years. She’d toss a few bucks at it every month or two to keep it active, but only ever used it for emergencies.
Well, it was turned off when AT&T decided to nuke its 3G service a couple months ago. MIL is… not tech savvy (and, has limited access to transportation).
We were down there this past week, getting assorted things sorted out for the parents, and one task was to take MIL to the AT&T store and get a new phone.
“mumble mumble plan no longer offered, grandfathered in, mumble mumble…”. I paid for the phone and “the first month’s service” just to finish the deal quickly, as MIL’s stamina is not the best.
Then I get them home, and set up online access, and find that nope, it IS a 30 dollar a month service. Unlimited talk and text. 5 gig of data.
On a FLIP PHONE.
This is a person who cannot figure out how to open a second tab on a computer browser. Who lost access to watching the big TV for months because someone accidentally hit the “switch input” button and it was stuck on the Roku home page. Who routinely spends an hour or more on the phone with scammers before twigging that it’s a scam, then claims (to us) that she’s proud of wasting their time. She does NOT need a data plan.
I told her, before we left town Friday, that I was going to try to get the plan straightened out, and that if I couldn’t, I’d get her a different setup and mail a new phone to her. I spent a half hour on the phone with an AT&T service rep trying to get it straightened out; she had no clue whatsoever and kept insisting that the 30/month plan was the BEST THING IN THE WORLD.
Zero clue as to whether we’re supposed to continue to pay AT&T something for the phone itself - I only shelled out 80 bucks or so for the initial transaction, and neither of us signed anything.
All in all, I don’t care if MIL and FIL have been AT&T customers in some way for 65 years. I’d pay another carrier the same amount just to screw AT&T out of the fees.
Basically, all the other carriers have gotten out of the business of providing cheap, talk/text only prepaid plans. Verizon bought TracFone, so I’m not sure what the deal is there anymore. Jitterbug / Lively still has something, and we could add a dumb phone to our Verizon plan (20 bucks a month, still cheaper than AT&T) - but there’s a niche, dammit, and the phone companies have all basically mandated that they will charge an excess amount for providing almost no service.