The Street and other business media is writing about the cellular industry having an issue with churn. Chrun is up at AT&T. AT&T blames it on seasonal as well as hardware upgrades, but also discounts ended for auto-pay subscribers and paperless.
I think that AT&T, VZW and T-Mo, respectively, thought that an MVNO – Cricket, Visible, Mint – would help them lower CAC (customer acquisition cost), churn and device subsidiary. They have seen Comcast and Spectrum kill it in wireless as an MVNO.
Comcast has 8.9M; Spectrum has almost 11M. T-Mo has 140M. VZW has 146M. AT&T has 119M.
When all things become equivalent, it is a commodity – and consumers want the lowest price OR at least not to have fees added.
I personally don’t understand the “discount expired” bullshit. If you call and spend 20 minutes on the phone, you get the discount for another year. And we will do that dance every year ad nauseum.
This shows how little these telcos think about the consumers. Play with the levers to make the payers dance.
Wait until I can have my voice AI assist call all the places I have subscriptions: SiriusXM, Netflix, Hulu, Google Fi, YouTubeTV and more. And just have them call every month regularly to ask for a discount. Switch the automation on them.
What happens when every consumer has a shopping assistant to continually lower subscription fees and get better offers?
On the flip side, with the macro-economics and politics making a mess of the economy, what happens when millions are unemployed? Do CEOs consider that the economy largely spins on consumer spending, so what happens there are too many unemployed?
So far this year, U.S. employers have announced 946,000 job cuts, the most since 2020. The number of managers at public companies dropped 6.1% from May 2022 to May 2025. This graduating college class faces stark employment choices.