T-Mobile wants to move 100 percent of upgrades online – will it shutter all stores?

T-Mobile  has teamed up with AI pioneers in the industry not just to revolutionize its network, but also to improve the way its customers are served. The company wants to transform the customer experience and take the bulk of transactions online. This has many people wondering if the company ultimately wants to minimize – if not fully eliminate – its physical footprint.The answer is not straightforward. While T-Mobile and some of its rivals are striving to shift most of their customer interactions online, it doesn’t necessarily mean that brick-and-mortar stores are going away, not anytime soon anyway.

In September, during its Capital Markets Day, T-Mobile said that it wanted to redefine itself into a data-informed and AI-enabled company. It wants all upgrades to happen online by 2027. It has also set the goal of doing at least half of activations digitally by the same period.

Jeff Moore, who is principal analyst at Wave7 Research, doesn’t buy into the doom and gloom narrative that wireless retail is dead. Wave7 Research studies the wireless market.Moore notes that although the number of postpaid retail stores run by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon has shrunk from 18,529 in 2022, to 17,607 today, it’s not quite the retail apocalypse that everyone imagines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In fact, some companies like Comcast and Charter Communications are actually boosting their physical presence. And then you have got retailers like Walmart who sell wireless services through partnerships with carriers who are expanding their wireless retail operations. Verizon‘s prepaid brand Total Wireless has also been increasing its store count.

An increasing number of Americans prefer to shop online though. For instance, during this Black Friday, online sales went up 14.6 percent, according to Mastercard Spending Pulse report – which covers the US retail market – while in-store sales only grew a paltry 0.7 percent compared to last year.