All Retail Businesses Should Follow Starbucks With WiFi
The announcement yesterday by Starbucks Coffee Company (NASDAQ: SBUX) that all locations will provide free WiFi service on July 1 is a call to action for businesses - corporate and mom-and-pop - to add their own WiFi service.
Starbucks has offered WiFi service in various forms in the past, including a paid service and more recently, a limited, free version which required a Starbucks card to use. But next month, it will join McDonald's and many other national food chains to offer WiFi, in addition to the free services also provided by Barnes and Noble (which serve Starbucks Coffee) and Borders Books.
It wasn't long ago, less than five years in fact, that WiFi hot spots started popping up in hotels and multinational retail chains. It was, however, treated like a premium service, and sometimes cost a premium price. But some small businesses, coffee shops mostly, and some municipalities got into the act and started to offer the wireless internet service for free.
For the coffeeshops it was a leg-up on the national brands. It quickly proved to be a loss-leader that could keep customers in their chairs buying their frozen whoopdeedoos and double-chocolate-chip cookies.The municipalities offered it in downtown areas as a way to hopefully bring more foot traffic away from the crowded, plastic malls and into the leafy main streets.
But now the game has changed, because in the intervening five years, the way users access WiFi is much different. It used to be only laptops could get online wirelessly either with a built-in or an external card. Now, dozens of "smart" phones are on the market using the web in ways very similar to what laptops can do, and in ways laptops are impractical.
Granted, these phones can access high-speed data over the cellular networks, but that data can be expensive - as proven recently by AT&T's move to put usage ceilings on its data plans for iPhones and iPads. Both devices, however, can turn off the cellular data and access free WiFi.
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