While I’m airing my dirty complaint laundry, here’s one that I just sent a guy at Piggly Wiggly about their craptastic wfii. They claim to offer “free wifi”, but what they offer is “pain in the ass unusable wifi.”
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Today I made the mistake of going to the Starbucks inside the Piggly Wiggly at Carolina Forest in Myrtle Beach. I needed to do some internet work over lunchtime and I had eaten lunch near there, so I figured I’d do it. Usually I go to the Starbucks at the beach, the one that has the only free and open wifi at any SBUX I know of.
So, I got a drink and sat down to work at Piggly Wiggly. I have an account that I have previously created. Going to your login page, it took about 90 seconds to accept my password and give me internet access. After that point, every 5 minutes, trying to load a web page would send me back to that login page. Finally, after 20 minutes of this, I got the login page, logged in AGAIN. This time it sat for several minutes and finally redirected me to a page that said ‘Oops, looks like you exceeded your maximum download…’ The whole 20 minutes I’d been working with this, I’d loaded a few pages, sent some emails, connected my IM clients but done nothing beyond the ordinary tasks any person with a laptop at any wifi point at lunchtime would do. How can I even have a maximum download? I’m the only one in here using the wifi, probably because I’m the only one dumb enough to not realize how bad it is. What exactly resource are you conserving by denying connectivity to me? You want to prevent the bit tank from draining in case someone wants some extra zeroes later on?
This is the last time I get burned by this. Piggly Wiggly’s free wifi is not free, because it makes me waste my time and that’s a more precious commodity to me than cash. I’ll avoid this like the plague, and when I get tempted to eat lunch or get a drink at Piggly Wiggly and use the internet I’ll remember that it is in fact useless. It’s a shame because this place is really convenient to me. I don’t know how much you pay to PublicIP to provide this service for you but it is too much. You’d do better with the commodity cheapest cable modem and a $40 wifi access point. At least that would work, rather than putting extra roadblocks in my way when I have work to do.
From now I’m taking my spending money elsewhere.
Dave Slusher
PS – I don’t know when this mail will send because I can’t get on your crappy wifi at all now.
