X

Meijer To Start Retailing Cricket's Products and Services

Cricket Wireless is teaming up with Meijer stores to make its products and services available to more consumers in the Midwest. Saturday, June 27th onwards, Meijer will offer its customers handsets, accessories and Universal SIM card activation kits from Cricket, in its 213 stores throughout the Midwest. Plans will start at $35 per month including taxes and fees with Auto Pay turned on, and $40 without the option. The plan will offer 2.5 GB of LTE data, along with unlimited talk and text. There are also monthly plans for $45 and $55, which come with 5 GB and 10 GB of data respectively, along with the customary unlimited talk and text. It is not immediately clear however, whether Meijer will also offer feature phones and the $25 per month unlimited talk and text feature phone plan that doesn’t come with any data allowance.

Cricket also said it will offer a number of “grab and go” phones by manufacturers like HTC, LG, Samsung and ZTE. Consumers will of course, also be able to use their existing unlocked devices with the company’s universal SIM cards. Announcing the strategic tie-up, Mr. Reed Good, the director of sales operations at Cricket Wireless said, “Cricket is excited to be working with a fellow retail pioneer like Meijer. Meijer invented ‘one-stop shopping’ and Cricket ‘re-invented’ the no-contract shopping experience. Together, we share a deep commitment to providing consumers with a first-class retail experience that includes quality products and services at affordable prices. With Meijer, we’ll extend that commitment to even more consumers across the Midwest, helping them gain access to the smartest choice in wireless: Cricket Wireless”.

Prepaid carriers have suddenly started seeing a bit of an emergence of late in the US, a country which has, for the most part, been a post-paid market for long. It was just the other day that Sprint’s prepaid subsidiary Boost Mobile launched its “Slash Your Payment in Half” promo, which is aimed at subscribers of fellow prepaid rivals Cricket and MetroPCS. With the prepaid market heating up, consumers can only gain from falling monthly bills. Industry insiders, however, are not exactly thrilled at the prospect of falling ARPUs, which they believe, will impact the bottom lines of the carriers real bad.