And keep in mind, there’s over 100 prepaid wireless consumers out in the United States now. It presents a huge opportunity without limits for us to piggyback on our technology layer platform and ACP that we’re using to get into these neighborhoods. So we expect this to be a big hit and we’re really looking forward to talking about the subscriber growth on Linkup Mobile and hopefully, we can have a good discussion about that on our next call.
Michael Diana: All right. Thank you very much and congratulations to you.
Brian Cox: Thank you, Michael.
Operator: Our next question comes from Ed Woo with Ascendiant Capital. Please go ahead.
Edward Woo: Yeah. Congratulations on the quarter and the profitable quarter. My question is you seem to have — the macro environment seems to be steady. Inflation is coming down, job growth is still relatively high. What are you seeing and hearing from the convenience store owners with obviously their core customer base? Are there any significant changes from the last couple of months?
Brian Cox: Ed, thanks for the question. It’s — I’ve talked about this for years and years now. It is a little bit interesting. Lower-income people are still lower income people. I think some of the macroeconomic things out there, more affect the middle to middle upper class, maybe a little bit more than lower income folks who are already on government assistance. I think there’s a scenario where more people might actually pull into our potential customer base, whether it be folks that are a little bit challenged financially with, let’s say, too much mouths, not enough check or immigrants coming. Like I said, we have a bilingual operations center and all of our products are in both English and Hispanic. So our potential customer base does increase by the day.
I don’t look at that and we’ve talked about this a lot. I don’t look at that as wishing any type of economic downfall on folks, but we do provide significant essential services to folks that may be in these situations. And I think you’re always going to have that lower-income prepaid market and for us to be able to provide them a savings on their wireless services. These are essential services now. A savings on most of the services that we offer, it does free up cash to spend on other things that they might have. So I think from the convenience store perspective and the convenience store owner, we stated earlier, they are getting bit quite a bit on the interest rates for the inventory they have in their store. So they’re definitely not looking at bringing in new inventory, new products or anything that’s not proven.
So if we were rolling out with a kiosk of new products or had a freestanding rack or something like that and it required the store owner to come out of pocket for new product launches, that will be a little bit difficult for us to do. It would be a tough sell right now. But quite on the contrary, we’re coming to the store with a, I call it, the first dollar you take is the first dollar you make product where there’s no inventory requirements. They’re making it on the transaction. And the great thing about these transactions is those customers have to come in the store to make the transaction. So they’ve got foot traffic, they’ve got reoccurring foot traffic. And they’re providing a service to their community and word of mouth gets up really fast that, hey — number one, hey, guys, you don’t have to go way back down the street to the A++ wireless store to make your wireless payments, you can go down to the C-store, the convenience store now.
And say, by the way, I also — while I was down there, I switched my service, I get to keep my same number, and now I’m saving $10 a month. That word gets around real fast and in an economic category where that $5 to $10 means a lot and traditionally hourly workers on government assistance that savings means a whole lot more to people when things are tight. So those are what we’re hearing. We think it’s a perfect window of opportunity. Sometimes when things are going great and money is falling through the cracks and people and store owners don’t really care because things are so fantastic, they’re not as open to new products or services because they’re a little content. It’s one of our downfalls as humans, not always looking to better ourselves or better ourselves financially.
