Shocking
Colleagues in the office were just talking about mobile phone contracts.
“I have seen one for £27 per month that looked reasonable”
That’s three hundred and twenty four pounds per year.
Earlier this month I downloaded my bank transactions and put them into Gnucash. It was easy to calculate how much I spent on my pay-as you go phone last year:
£50.00
That’s four pounds and sixteen pence per month.
I’m shocked. It feels to me as if mobile phone contracts are contrived to encourage addictive and exploitative behaviour. To get value from free minutes, free SMS and free Internet, one must use them all up. I have a pay-as-you-go phone with no free minutes, no Internet and no free SMS. I pay for everything: 5p per text, 15p per minute for all calls. Paying for everything I use discourages me from using my phone. I use it less, and I pay very little.
I wonder whether if we actually paid for the real cost of our use of ecosystem services, we might use them less and ultimately have less to pay in terms of damage to the environment, climate biodiversity, resilience, etc.
Corrina Says:
I text a lot now I have an ‘unlimited’ contract. I probably don’t want to know but please do tell me the scary facts about what harm a text does…
November 19th, 2009 at 12:08 amMark Says:
Corrina, I didn’t mean to suggest that your SMSs are destroying the planet. The last paragraph was me musing on pricing policies and micro-economics in general: if the price of our consumption truly reflected the cost to the environment, our habits would be different.
I think free minutes and free SMS are about encouraging consumption: use ‘em all up. Paying for each unit encourages a more frugal approach. Frugality is not fashionable: inconsistent with capitalist virtue. It was the survival strategy of our grandparents and will be that of our grandchildren.
Use your SMSs sparingly and wisely to bring about change.
November 21st, 2009 at 9:58 am