Like most phone card vendors across New Providence, Watson Petit sold cards at discounted rates to lure pre-paid cellular customers to his booth on Thompson Boulevard.
However, when the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) implemented its new EZ Top-Up plan, Petit began selling cards for one dollar above the face value to offset profit losses.
It took one warning from BTC to persuade him to drop his prices.
"For the first week I was selling it above the face value but then they say they was locking up people so I had to go back selling it at face value," he said.  "Some people were buying them but others were saying, 'no I'm not paying that'."
BTC never threatened to have anyone arrested for selling phone cards above the face value.
However, the company did place a notice in Tuesday's Nassau Guardian : "Vendors are not authorized to sell BTC prepaid phone cards above face value.  The public is asked not to purchase any BTC phone card above face value and advise BTC of any vendor who is selling cards above the face value."
BTC also placed a full-page ad in the newspaper that listed retailers to buy cards from.
Vendor Corey thompson said he never overcharged his customers.  However, he did stop selling his $20 phone cards at a reduced rate.
He said there are less phone card vendors on the streets of New Providence as a result of BTC's new EZ Top-UP plan.
"What they doing with the phone cards is a bunch of foolishness," he said.  "You killin' people livelihood doing that."
Some roadside retailers also expressed concern over recent comments made by BTC's vice president of sales and marketing Marlon Johnson, who predicted that 80 percent of this market could be electronic in two years.
Thompson said he was considering selling other products at his booth on Wulff Road to support his two children.
"I'm a skilled mason but I have some ideas whereas I can set up right out here and still operate," he said.  "Maybe [sell] like five gallon bottles of water, t-shirts and maybe newspapers."
Johnson admitted that the introduction of EZTop-Up would likely damage the business of independent phone card vendors.
However, he said the new system would create additional economic benefits for more Bahamians in the long run.
"It will hurt some vendors.  You can't run away from the fact that there will be initial fall off, but we believe that over time there will be a lot more opportunities created.  We know that people sell credit the world over and make a living off of it.  And the important thing is, we want to encourage legitimate persons to step up and be involved," Johnson said.
"One of the things we are working on is to encourage people to become BTC store owners, selling BTC phones and doing a lot more.  So economic and entrepreneurial opportunities are going to increase.  This is a necessary step to get us to the point where we can have a distribution structure."

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