Wow, now there’s a title you probably thought you’d never see. Cell phone discrimination, is it real, or is it just advertising?
The most well known is the one “If you are a Cingular user, text to XXXX and vote for your favorite Idol. Well wait a minute. What if I’m a US Cellular user? Does that mean I can’t text in my vote? Does that mean I have to keep dialing until I get through without a busy signal? That just isn’t fair.
Sounds a little silly right? I was thinking about this yesterday while I was watching some football. They (not really sure who they are) are running an ad about the best NFL story and are going to air it during the Super Bowl. I saw one story that I thought was pretty good and thought I’d like to vote on it. Then they made that statement, “Just text your choice to XXXX if you are a Sprint cellular user”.
There was no alternative way to vote. They didn’t give a number for those of us using other services. They didn’t give out a website address to vote on. We could only vote if we were customers of Sprint Cellular.
That’s discrimination.
Ok, I know what you are thinking. This is being paid for by Sprint and they are just using some clever advertising.
Cellular ads in general are kind of strange to me to begin with. Most people can’t just switch over to another service. Have you read the fine print lately? Most cell companies now have a 2 year contract. If you break the contract you will pay. Hmm, do you think they’ll postpone the Super Bowl for another 1.5 years? That’s what I have left on my current contract since buying that new phone last summer. Otherwise I’ll have to pay a couple of hundred dollars to break it just so that I can switch over to Sprint to be able to vote.
With most of these types of things they always give you alternative methods to vote. This one, however, does not make it very clear as to how or if I can vote in some other manner. I feel discriminated against.
Do you Think Gloria Allred is up for the case?
