We regularly post discoveries from what we call the Raiders of the Lost Walmart, usually obsolete technology that is still on the shelf at comically high prices. It’s fun to laugh at the ancient digital cameras, defunct multiplayer games, and indestructible classic phones on the shelf, but the electronics clearance shelf can be a hazardous place for people who don’t read fine print.
Paris found this phone on the shelf at a Walmart in Ohio. Walmart is charging $20 for a flip phone that you can put on the Cricket network for a low price? That’s fine, since anyone using a flip phone probably isn’t after the latest technology anyway.
The problem with this phone, though, is that it was probably put on the market in 2013 or 2014, around the time that AT&T acquired Cricket, and announced plans to turn off their CDMA network, requiring all users to get new phones.
A phone from 2013 isn’t old at all, but the problem is that shutdown happened in 2015.
At least AT&T was nice enough to put a notice about the changeover on the phones they were selling at the time… perhaps not realizing that the devices would still be on store shelves after the old network shut down. They even added a nice heads-up about the shift to mandatory arbitration under AT&T.
Unfortunately, no one at Walmart noticed it, and this phone hasn’t been languishing on a clearance shelf since 2014: someone put a new price sticker on it back in December.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist