An Open Letter To 7-Eleven Speakout Wireless 2023-08-14
I have a 7-Eleven Speakout SIM card. I've had 7-Eleven SIM cards for a long time. I've even suggested to lots of people that they use 7-Eleven service. It is basically resold Rogers service and it has a couple of advantages over the competition. The first is that they offer prepaid service, the second is 365 day credit expiry. Prepaid service is where you dump some money in to a 7-Eleven account and then pay per-minute to use your phone. The cost per-minute is pretty ridiculous, but it is worth it if you are just planning to use the phone in a pinch (as opposed to using your phone for everything like a typical millennial). There is no "data" included, but it can be bought in very small increments for way too much money. Still, if you are capable of managing your phone use you can have a phone for a LOT cheaper than the bullshit plans Bell, Rogers, and Telus offer.
Aside from not wanting to buy in to the three big communications companies here, I also don't much care for Google and Samsung putting a load of crappy software on my phone. I don't much appreciate being tracked, advertised at, and generally treated as their own monetized whore. It is possible to put custom ROMs on phones, but I couldn't find a ROM for my J2Pro. So I decided to tackle manually removing a bunch of apps at the command line using ADB Tools. It is painfully slow, and mistakes have to be undone by doing a factory reset which will bring back all the crap you uninstalled. It is a real hassle, but I wanted to have the phone as clean as I could get it. Unfortunately, I kept running in to what I thought was problems with the dialer. Turns out my stupid 7-Eleven account credit expired.
Finally... The Open Letter
Dear 7-Eleven Speakout,
You know that people get irritated when their credit expires and you just keep the money for yourselves. I know you get support questions about it all the time. I know the CRTC made it mandatory for wireless providers to give customers a week to get their minutes back. You also know that the type of accounts you are selling are specifically geared towards people who use their phones infrequently, and that a week of no-usage is not uncommon at all. But you don't much care, and that sucks. You know that you could easily and inexpensively setup an email alert for accounts that will expire in 2 days and another for accounts that have been expired for 2 days. Of course that would save some folks the pain of buying new SIM cards and fresh top-ups and losing their saved balance. The balance that goes in your pocket for having done nothing more than allowing customers to unintentionally let their minutes expire. For little effort and little cost you could make your customers happier, but you choose not to.
That is a dick move.
Nice job.