Class Is Open For Business
In a First, Hub Students Operate Wireless Phone Store
The Boston Globe
October 31, 2002
By Peter J. Howe
Forget about "Want fries with that?" At their part-time jobs, Boston high school juniors Stesha Emmanuel and Luis Gonzalez are asking, "Want high-speed wireless data service and a national calling plan with that?"
Emmanuel, 16, of Dorchester, and Gonzalez, 17, of East Boston, are among 10 students in an entrepreneurship business class at the Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH) near Boston University who have helped launch what appears to be a one-of-its-kind US venture: a full-fledged wireless phone store operated by high school students, with faculty and volunteer oversight.
The MATCH Wireless store, which has been open for business since August, will have its official grand opening tomorrow as the newest of about 400 Sprint PCS retail outlets in New England. The event will be a milestone in school leaders' efforts to aim higher than the usual high school business ventures selling candy bars and magazine subscriptions and washing cars.
MATCH Wireless is expected to become a six-figure annual business that will require students to make decisions about marketing strategies and personnel management - and, the school hopes, turn a profit by this winter.
Emmanuel, who has worked as an intern at a law firm and a checkout clerk at a Marshalls discount store in the Back Bay, said she loves the complexity of selling sophisticated wireless technology and services.
"Working in retail, you're just ringing up people's clothes - get them in, get them out," Emmanuel said. "With selling Sprint, you're actually getting to the point of communicating much more than just, 'Hi, how are you? How can I help you?'" Emmanuel, who is thinking about a career as a lawyer, said she can already envision how her experiences at MATCH Wireless would help her in setting up her own law office.
Gonzalez said he loves learning about the technology, including a new miniature camera Sprint is selling that can be attached to a cellphone and used to transmit digital photos. And he thinks interacting with customers will help when he goes for college-admission interviews next fall.
"We learn all about dealing with customers, how to speak with them," Gonzalez said. "It helps me to get more comfortable with people. It's more fun than I had expected."
Working eight to 10 hours a week at the store complements the once-a-week entrepreneurship classes being taken by about 10 of the 35 juniors at MATCH, a three-year-old charter school with 160 students that has been heavily supported by local technology companies, including Akamai Technologies of Cambridge.
MATCH moved this fall from temporary quarters at a temple in Brookline into the Commonwealth Avenue building occupied for years by automotive supply company Ellis The Rim Man, with a small, first-floor corner retail space by an MBTA Green Line trolley stop.
As a business venture, MATCH Wireless is starting at a challenging time. The once explosive growth in cellphone ownership has leveled off, with about 61 percent of all Greater Boston residents already owning a phone, according to Telephia, a San Francisco research house. Sprint PCS and Cingular Wireless suffered a net loss in customers in the third quarter, and much of the current customer traffic is coming from dissatisfied subscribers leaving one carrier for another.
Within a few hundred feet of MATCH Wireless are Cingular and T-Mobile stores, as well as a Radio Shack selling Sprint and Verizon cellphones.
Jennifer Meyers, who oversees the MATCH store as director of the school's entrepreneurship academy, said it exceeded sales expectations for September after a "soft opening" in late August. But she said this month has been slow, which industry analysts say is customary.
As the store's sales volume increases, however, it gets a $10-a-phone marketing bonus from Sprint, and Meyers said students are brimming with ideas for "guerrilla marketing" campaigns in Boston neighborhoods.
They are also hoping to appeal to what MATCH School executive director Alan P. G. Safran called "socially conscious" cellphone buyers. By several measures, MATCH school students come from the lowest-income households of any high school in the state, with significant numbers coming from Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury.
Once the store becomes profitable and students begin collecting paychecks instead of working as interns, their pay will be credited to college accounts they can tap only for tuition, housing, or textbook expenses. The school, which will graduate its first senior class a year from June, has as "its whole mission the idea that you will be a success in college," says founder Mike Goldstein. "Many of our kids will be the first ones in their family to graduate from a four-year college, but it's part of our identity: You are going to college."
In planning the MATCH program, Goldstein said he looked at programs offered by Junior Achievement, the Colorado-based organization that offers classes in business practice for more than 4 million students annually. But he concluded the school wanted something more compelling.
"While JA does a nice job of teaching kids about personal finance and bringing volunteers into the classroom, entrepreneurship is about real risk and real reward," Goldstein said. MATCH Wireless students "will be put up to challenges that are real, not the imaginary version," he added.
Mike O'Keefe, who oversees so-called indirect sales outlets for Sprint's New England region, said the store's performance has exceeded expectations, although it will be months before Sprint will decide whether to replicate the idea elsewhere in the country.
"Probably the most successful part of the piece has been the energy and the enthusiasm of these kids in the store," O'Keefe said. "It's very refreshing to go down there. There's a very high energy level, and these kids really have pride in what they do."
O'Keefe said he has been impressed by requests for demographic and marketing data he gets from the MATCH Wireless students. "They're not just sitting there waiting for somebody to come in the door. They've really been thinking out of the box."
Brian Anderson, director of programs for the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which over the past 15 years has trained 2,700 teachers and supplied curricula for 5,000 students in 43 states and 13 foreign countries, said the store "is unprecedented as far as we know."
To have high school students running a bona fide retail storefront on a busy city street in Boston is "just incredible," Anderson said. Given the cachet of cellphone ownership among teenagers, Anderson said he could see MATCH Wireless, if it succeeds, inspiring similar stores at other schools around the country. "It's really going to be a model that I hope others will follow," he said.
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2002 Headlines |
Class Is Open For Business
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