July 8, 2023—’The World Is Flat’ – Journalist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book predicted that the birth of the internet will contribute a lot in making wherever you are the same as wherever others are. He was almost right: People in the United States wear clothings that are similar to those in other countries – sweat shirts and short pants in summer and hoodies and skinny gym pants in winter. In another example of the flattened world, people consume increasingly similar food; ramen in New York is no longer an exotic and burgers in Seoul are as common as kimchi. It’s as if the world is moving according to Friedman’s predictions.
Steadily progressive societal and cultural assimilation had seemed like the inevitable norm until the late 2020’s no matter what world leaders had to say about sovereignty, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020. Foreign travelers to the United States felt like visiting their own countries’ spots when they landed at Los Angeles or New York, paying their ways to hotels with credit cards and making calls from their phones seamlessly. Now, it’s a bit of struggle – though not of the kind that causes panic – for visitors to the United States if they fail to make prior arrangements before leaving their countries.
Typically, a visitor would have his/her smartphone installed with a sim card that enables making phone calls, checking emails, and tapping into websites, all transactions seamlessly. Visitors would 1) use their home country phone careers’ roaming options to do that (expensive), 2) purchase a prepaid sim card in the United States (which is what many people seem to prefer), or 3) sign on to long-term American career contracts (unrealistic).
Over years, I’d been adopting the 2nd method: Going to a local Verison, AT&T, or T-mobile shop to purchase a U.S. sim card. It was a simple piece of work taking no more than half an hour to activate my smartphone as a U.S. phone. It was not easy, on the contrary, when I visited a West Coast city recently. I was told by a Verison shop clerk that the career (or the shop I visited) did not sell prepaid sim cards If I wanted a U.S. sim, he told me, I needed to get onto a monthly contract. ‘You can cancel the contract anytime after getting your sim,’ I was told.
A T-mobile shop had a prepaid sim card but it sounded far more costly than I thought, so I did not bother buying one. Yet another career did have a decent deal for frustrated guys like me, so I bought a sim starter kit and slapped the sim into my iPhone. It didn’t activate so I gave up on that sim and decided to settle on wi-fi connections alone during my visit, feeling exhausted and somewhat angry, the first hurdle I had to experience.
Many retailers were offering discounts on merchandise, including Macy’s at San Francisco’s Union Square and other retail outlets, so one day I went to one of the stores to tap its offers. The store clerk asked me whether I had a local address and/or a phone number. I told her that I was a visitor, then she told me that I could not qualify for a discount. (I could of course have used my hotel address/phone number.)
Smart phone-only transactions were another invisible barrier to me. For people like me without active local smart phone connections, transacting for smart phone-only payments was anything but frustrating. Luckily I was carrying some cash, though.
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