Barnes & Noble becomes the latest chain to see the benefit of free: Times are tough, and what better way to bring more people in than to offer an amenity that's relatively cheap for you to provide, and which seems like a high value to your potential customers? B&N sees the light, and switches its AT&T Wi-Fi service from fee to free. At last count, B&N says it has 777 stores across all U.S. states.
Wi-Fi was once seen as a revenue opportunity by many kinds of venues, and I have long argued that Wi-Fi would simply become the air we breath. You don't pay for oxygen (except at oxygen bars; do those still exist?), and people just want service. The idea of ubiquitous free or flat-rate offerings is what's driven the growth of 3G, despite low monthly bandwidth caps on laptop-based service.
Part of my notion is that service becomes so cheap to offer and so necessary, that either venues charge nothing, or they primarily have as customers those who have low or corporate-paid flat-rate plans. For a business traveler paying $10 per month to Boingo Wireless, or whose corporate parent is paying tens of dollars per month to iPass, using a fee location is a free transaction.
B&N attracts mostly consumers, and thus free needs to be totally free. Given that B&N makes a good margin on anything it sells in the store, from a latte at an in-store cafe to a magazine or newspaper to a bestselling book, a single purchase of more than about $2 pays for the cost of that customer quite easily.
The mega bookstore chain has had a slightly rocky road with Wi-Fi. In the early days, it wasn't convinced of the utility, and then ultimately signed up with the ill-fated Cometa in 2004. When Cometa imploded shortly thereafter, what was then SBC (and now AT&T) signed up B&N.
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