Thursday, December 17, 2009

T-Mobile Replaces Ritmo Latino

Pretty quick turnover here. Ritmo Latino abruptly closed last month; actually, fairly late last month. And already, T-Mobile, the international telecom and cell phone company has already moved in. They open today at 10:00am. T-Mobile generally runs fourth behind Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, in terms of cell phone subscriptions in the U.S. Its owned by a German company, Deutsche Telekom.

The store is located at 1775 Columbia Road NW, next to Old City Jerusalem Cafe. Today's opening means that the space was vacant for less than one month. Pretty amazing feat around here. Usually we anticipate retail build outs for months on end. Maybe they wanted to get in on the holiday sales. And there are growing rumors that the Google Nexus One phone will debut on T-Mobile early next year. In any event, storefront continuity maintained.

Update: Thanks to anon in the comments for pointing me toward the real reason for the quick build out. The owner of the Ritmo Latino chain has teamed up with T-Mobile in a new program called T-Mobile Estamos Juntos; a modified store franchising model operating in Latino communities in the U.S. Here's an article in Entrepreneur explaining the new Ritmo-T-Mobile relationship.