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Sprint

Note: Oops. This post was accidentally made “Public” before it was even written. Silly me. Short post? Quite not like me. Obviously something was awry! =)

I recently got a new cell phone. (Yay!)

While I’d been contemplating switching carriers to either T-Mobile or Cingular (so that I could get a slick, slim GSM phone), I ended up staying with Sprint and signing away another two years of my cellular life because I’m on a family plan and other family members resigned their two year agreements without letting me know.

So I’m stuck with Sprint… not that I’m not happy with Sprint… the service is good in all the places we use it most  (NY, Philly, Los Angeles, San Francisco) but … I must say that it’s been a truly love-hate relationship in that I end up wasting about 2-3 hours every 4-6 months explaining to Customer Service Representatives and Supervisors what they need to do to make me, the customer, happy. Or at least, less disgruntled. =)

Anyway, we’re currently on a Fair & Flexible Plan which means we have a variable number of minutes and our plan cost depends on our actual usage. Currently, we pay $70 for the first 800 minutes and then incrementally for each block of 100 to 200 additional minutes. Good for when we have low usage… bad when we go way over. Well, our plan dates back to early 2005 when they first rolled out the product… and lacks certain features that are currently already built-in.

For instance, Free Nights & Weekends starting at 7PM. It’s free with the new Fair & Flexible Plans… but we’re still paying $5 per month for it… which adds up to a big $60 per year! Hrmph!

And having recently resigned my two year agreement, I noted that the terms and rates of the new Fair & Flexible Plans were different from ours and maybe it was time to update our plan (for instance, the $59.99 plan gets 1,000 minutes when we pay $70 for only 800!) …

But it wasn’t so easy to determine what the best plan might be because it’s no longer just fixed minutes but varies by use.

So, given that I had some spare time on my hands… I plotted out what the cost of each available plan would be based on minutes used each month. (I know, I know. Quite sad. Look what working life has done to me…)

The point denoted on the blue line was the level of our most current month’s usage. And this month was somewhat higher than usual. Which is weird, since I wasn’t even in the country for at least 80% of the month!

Anyway, on first glance, if this month was a higher than normal level of usage, and our usage tends to be below 1,400 minutes per month on average, it would be cheaper to switch to the $59.99 plan rather than sticking to our current $70 + $5 (for nights & weekends starting at 7PM) plan.

And then, I realized I was looking at the wrong rates. (I think I’m losing brain cells every day.)

Those were the rates for the individual Fair & Flexible plans.

So, I re-plotted the rates for the family Fair & Flexible plans which looked like this:

All of a sudden, our current plan was looking quite good! =)

The current equivalent of our plan would be the $69.99 for 800 (compared to our $70 for 800 + $5 for the early nights & weekends option).

However, the new plan has a steeper slope translating into higher cost per additional minute at greater usage levels! My moment of boredom and use of Excel to keep entertained (incredibly sad, I know =P) saved me from making a bad decision of switching to a seemingly better plan (save 1 cent per month on the base plus the $5 for the nights & weekends!).

So, the moral of the story is, read the fine print and details when comparing two seemingly similar things! =)

Intelliflix

**EDIT: Since the original date of this post, not only did I decide to quit the DVD rental service altogether, but American Express is also investigating additional charges to my card by Intelliflix and their refusal to deal with customer service issues.  Intelliflix might once have offered an incredible deal… “HOWEVER, this is by far the worst rated dvd rental service by visitors to this site. Take heed at the reviews below and avoid joining this service.” ( http://www.dvdrr.com/reviews/Intelliflix.html ). STAY AWAY AND BE FOREWARNED!!**

And now, some more fun manipulating data in Excel… =)

In about a week, on August 18, 2006, my one-year subscription of Intelliflix  which I mentioned long ago when discussing movies , will come to an end.

To renew, or not to renew: that is the question…

And to answer that question, given that I’ve had plenty of free time on my hands, I decided to do a little bit of analysis on whether I ought to or not. =)

Obviously, the main issue to consider would be that of cost.

When I originally signed up for Intelliflix, the monthly cost for an unlimited 3 DVDs-out-at-a-time plan was a crazy $8.25 per month (with taxes about $8.75 for an annual total of $104.94 ). Given that a movie in theaters costs $10.75, it made a lot of sense to save money by waiting for movies to comne out on DVD and watch them in the comfort of my home. However, the rate has now gone up to $11.92 per month (for an annual total of $143 ) for the same package which represents a 36% increase !

During the past year, I have received a total of 91 DVDs with an expected 4 more to be viewed before the end of my subscription for a grand total of 95 movies with an additional 56 DVDs still in my queue. My average cost for each movie over the past year was $1.10 (consider now, that it costs Intelliflix $0.78 per DVD just in postage!) Below is a chart detailing my average cost per month based on the number of DVDs I borrowed per month:

As the number of DVDs decreases, the cost per DVD goes up. Note the general declining trend in the number of DVDs received per month.

One of my early concerns was that Intelliflix would be losing so much money that they might go out of business before my one-year subscription ended. =)

Obviously, they’re still around. I suppose that they have customers who rent a handful of movies per month to offset each customer like me that must generate losses. =)

For an idea of how unprofitable this business could be, look at what portion of the revenues received from me went straight to postage!

From revenues of about $8.75 per month, red indicates the portion that went straight to postage. Which leaves the blue amounts to cover other costs (direct labor, marketing, etc.) and then… some profit? In the months of August and September of 2005, postage accounted for greater than 100% of revenues!

The trend above seems to indicate that over the past year, my average cost per DVD has gone up along with Intelliflix’s profit. And this is due to the fact that it takes more and more days to ship and receive DVDs than it did when I first joined.

The more days that the DVD is out (difference between ship date and return date), the less DVDs that are mailed out per month. So, from a low of about 8.5 days in October 2005 to a projected high of 11.6 days in August 2006… the conclusion is that turnaround times have gotten longer and considerably worse!

The long story short is this. My subscription is running out. My cost is going up from $1.10 per DVD to an estimated $2.31 per DVD (only if I rent the same number of DVDs). However, turnaround times have gotten worse (which lowers their cost and increases mine and also means I won’t be able to rent as many DVDs) because they sometimes ship from as far away as California!

My options:

• End my subscription and save $143 per year (but probably spend more at theaters at $10.75/movie).
• Renew my subscription for $143 per year (but I’ll probably receive less movies because I travel so much that I’m not here when the DVDs arrive which will increase average days out).
• Jump ship and move to Netflix which costs a bit more ($14.99 per month plus taxes) , but might make up for it with fast turnaround time (ships from NY which might mean total turnaround time as low as 3-5 days?).

So, does anybody use Netflix or Blockbuster and have anything good or bad to say about either service? =)