It’s unknown how long it will last, but for now, Costco appears to be settling into a single-vendor strategy for selling wireless services, divvying stores up between AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.
Fierce reached out to the Costco media request line earlier this week and hasn’t heard back from Costco on its wireless sales strategy. But Costco club members probably have noticed the presence of just one of the three big carriers in their local Costco stores.
Jeff Moore, principal at Wave7 Research, said a source informed him that it’s a roughly three-way split among the biggest wireless providers. “Some stores have T-Mobile kiosks, some stores have AT&T kiosks, some stores have Verizon kiosks,” he said.
What’s a little different is how the carriers are staffing the kiosks, he said, as it varies as to whether carriers are using their own corporate staff or a third-party staffing service.
From 3 to 1
Wireless Advocates, which ran kiosks in Costco stores that sold all three big-name wireless brands, abruptly shut down last December, leaving a lot of employees in the lurch.
Prior to that, “you could walk into nearly any Costco in America and you would see sales of all three – T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T,” Moore said. “For the post-Sprint days, it was really a tripod at nearly all Costcos.”
It’s also unknown how Costco is assigning stores to the carriers, but Moore said coverage probably isn’t a big deal. Most of the stores are in urban areas where one would expect to have decent coverage from all three carriers.
“It may be that this is a bake-off,” where Costco ultimately picks one of the three and kicks the other two out, he said. “I don’t know. No one has actually articulated what their strategy is to me.”
Based on Wave7’s research, Costco has about 587 stores across the U.S.