Donate Cell Phone Minutes
Verizon Wireless must love me.
My cell phone carrier charges me $60 a month for 400 minutes worth of call time and text-messages. I use maybe 20 minutes a month, generally with people who also have Verizon. They're getting that $60 a month no matter how much cost I'm incurring for them based on my usage, and I know that they're banking a ton of profit from me.
This is common. You might have seen those commercials for one major carrier where the mother is lecturing her teenage son about rollover minutes. Her whole speech has the tone of "When I was your age, we didn't have all these extra minutes...", and a lesson about how he shouldn't take for granted all the extra cell phone time they have. In the commercials, the extra minutes are represented physically by little silver discs with clocks on them. It's silly, but solidifies an important existing surplus, part of which I contribute to each month through Verizon.
I volunteer at a local soup kitchen, and most of the people who come in and eat are homeless or financially disadvantaged in some way. Sometimes, the diners who come in ask those the volunteers serving the food if they can borrow their cell phones to make calls.
All people, homeless or not, have connections and need to stay in touch with other human beings. Most of them just don't have the FICO score that lets them get a contract with a major carrier, let alone the money to pay the monthly contract. Here's a philanthropic idea: let customers of major cell phone carriers donate their unused minutes, if they're available, at the end of each month, up to a certain limit. Allocate these minutes out to those who are disadvantaged and need them, but can't afford them.
This would be great PR for Verizon or AT&T. They could give people simple, cheap phones, like the pre-paid phones you can buy at convenience stores, and give them a monthly minute budget. It would make customers feel good about their carrier, and good about themselves. More importantly, it would be helping those less fortunate.
At the very least, it would be a welcome change from Luke Wilson and that Verizon Wireless nerd deriding one another in television commercials.
My cell phone carrier charges me $60 a month for 400 minutes worth of call time and text-messages. I use maybe 20 minutes a month, generally with people who also have Verizon. They're getting that $60 a month no matter how much cost I'm incurring for them based on my usage, and I know that they're banking a ton of profit from me.
This is common. You might have seen those commercials for one major carrier where the mother is lecturing her teenage son about rollover minutes. Her whole speech has the tone of "When I was your age, we didn't have all these extra minutes...", and a lesson about how he shouldn't take for granted all the extra cell phone time they have. In the commercials, the extra minutes are represented physically by little silver discs with clocks on them. It's silly, but solidifies an important existing surplus, part of which I contribute to each month through Verizon.
I volunteer at a local soup kitchen, and most of the people who come in and eat are homeless or financially disadvantaged in some way. Sometimes, the diners who come in ask those the volunteers serving the food if they can borrow their cell phones to make calls.
All people, homeless or not, have connections and need to stay in touch with other human beings. Most of them just don't have the FICO score that lets them get a contract with a major carrier, let alone the money to pay the monthly contract. Here's a philanthropic idea: let customers of major cell phone carriers donate their unused minutes, if they're available, at the end of each month, up to a certain limit. Allocate these minutes out to those who are disadvantaged and need them, but can't afford them.
This would be great PR for Verizon or AT&T. They could give people simple, cheap phones, like the pre-paid phones you can buy at convenience stores, and give them a monthly minute budget. It would make customers feel good about their carrier, and good about themselves. More importantly, it would be helping those less fortunate.
At the very least, it would be a welcome change from Luke Wilson and that Verizon Wireless nerd deriding one another in television commercials.