Once ubiquitous part of Americana becoming more and more scarce

Mitch Sneed, Publisher
Published: July 19, 2008

Is your cell phone dead and you need to let the family know you will be late? No problem, just pull in and use the pay phone, right?

Not so fast, my friend. Finding a pay phone these days is not that easy.

The number of coin-operated phones has seen a steady decline worldwide, with evidence of the impact of cost-effective cellular phones especially evident in Virginia and the Culpeper area.
According to Jim Mullenaux of the Commonwealth of Virginia State Corporation Commission, there are only an estimated 96 pay phones left in Culpeper County. But that number is a bit misleading. Those 96 phones are stationed at just 57 locations, making finding a phone tough.

The 96 local phones are down from the estimated 391 that were in Culpeper County in 1988, representing a 75 percent decline in just two decades.

“You may have a place like a grocery store or hospital that has three or four phones,” Mullenaux said. “So what we are seeing everywhere is businesses, except those that have a high pedestrian traffic, opting not to have pay phones.”

In Virginia, there were 36,240 pay phones in 2004. Just a year later, the number had fallen by 2,402 to just 33,838. In 2006, there were just 29,749 pay phones in Virginia and last year the number dwindled to 26,226, according to State Corporation Commission numbers.

The number of payphones in America dropped by more than a million in just a decade, according to the Federal Communications Commission, falling from 2,086,540 in 1997 to just 1,006,802 at the start of 2007.

Why the steady decline? Two words – cell phones.

In 1984, there were 92,000 cellular service subscribers nationally, according to the FCC and 2007 started with more than 217 million cell service users.

Cellular phones were once reserved for the wealthy, but today you can buy a cell phone anywhere for next to nothing, even in the same convenience stores pay phones once called home.

“Cell phones have almost made pay phones practically obsolete,” said Margaret Weakley, who is a manager at the Main Street 7-Eleven in Culpeper. “We don’t have one here anymore and they had really become more trouble than they were worth. Between the damage and the people hanging around, we just didn’t see the need. Almost everyone has a cell phone these days anyway.”

As an illustration as to how seldom used these phones are today, over a two-hour period Wednesday at the Food Lion on James Madison Highway in Culpeper, not a single user dropped a coin to make a call.

The decline of the pay phone is the latest development for a device that was part of Americana.

According to the American Public Communications Council, William Gray invented the first “unattended” pay phone in 1891 and the first three-coin slot pay phone was introduced in 1913. The look of pay phones remained essentially the same until 1965 when the three-coin booth phones began to give way to the standalone single-coin models that are still used today. Phones went from rotary to push button in the late 70s and early 80s, according to APCC information.

The price went from a nickel in the 1950s and early 60s to a dime until it was almost universally made 20 cents in the early 1980s. In 1984, the move to the one-coin quarter calls was universal before yielding to 50 cents in 2001.

From kids seeing how many people they could fit into a phone booth, to checking the coin return for change, to country music songs that give the musical message “here’s a quarter, call someone who cares,” pay phones have been part of our lives. But for how much longer?

In 2007, phone company giant AT&T announced that it would divest itself of the last 60,000 phones it owned in this country. Most experts predict more of the same, but believe the devices will never be totally extinct.

The FCC estimates that there 14 million Americans who have no home phone service, and 134 million who do not own cell phones.

“They fill a need,” APCC President Randy Nichols said. “But for some companies it comes down to profits and that’s why you see a decline. But for some people, it’s all they have.”

Mitch Sneed can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 102 or .