I keep the latest edition of our area’s yellowbook near the kitchen phone. I just used it 2 days ago to find a company to repair a broken garage door spring. The computer wasn’t turned on and in the time it would have taken it to boot up, I was on the phone scheduling a service call.
Even when the computer is on, I’ve found it’s faster to flip thru the book than search for local businesses, many of which don’t have sites. In fact, online searches tend to bring up far too many non-useful hits when I’m looking for something in particular in my county.
Bottom line, I don’t use it daily, but given a choice, I generally prefer going to the yellow pages than to a search engine.
Haven’t picked one up in years. My business has the free listing, but no extra stuff. At home they get recycled. At work I recieve many copies (one per line) and although I’ve specifically requested they not deliver any, they still show up.
I never use the phone book to look up phone numbers anymore. I don’t use the Yellow Pages.
As for the book itself: I keep a lightweight plastic box on my front porch for package deliveries, USPS, FedEx, and UPS. One day the new phone book showed up in that box. I left it there to hold the box down so it doesn’t blow away.
The reason I ask, in case you care, is that the local phone company is hitting up my business to renew our Yellow Pages ad. I understand that the SDMB is hardly an unbiased group of Luddites, but I’m still curious as to whether that ad is worth spending money on.
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I haven’t used a paper phone book in over a year. But I might well consult the local Yellow Pages if I were in an unfamiliar town and needed a pizza or an auto mechanic or something like that.
I use one occasionally to look up something for one of my patients when I’m in their home. If I had a data plan for my phone, I’d rather use that, but I don’t. And only one of my patients has a computer with internet access. They all have and use phone books.
So I’d say it depends on your business. If you’re serving the over 60 poor people crowd, then definitely keep your Yellow Pages ad.
Do white pages have mobile numbers in them? I seem to recall they didn’t at first because numbers would change when you got a new phone, but now because of simcards that rarely happens, probably less often than landline numbers change, so I wonder if they’ve changed their policy along with that technological progress.
Johanna’s post reminded me of the fact that Mark Twain commented on the current usefulness of phone books, without benefit of the Yellow Pages, the Internet, and maybe (depending on the date of this quote) even without the benefit of a phone:
I use them as booster seats when my niece and nephew are at my place.
Seriously, I don’t understand why they still deliver them in this area. I can appreciate that the yellow pages might be somewhat useful in areas that have poor internet/cell coverage, so businesses may not have reached the point where a web page is absolutely necessary yet, but I’ve never had trouble finding anything I needed in a google search. I’d think it would be much more effective to just deliver a handful to the apartment complex and let the people who need them get them or let people request them or whatever rather than deliver them to everyone.
The reason I ask, in case you care, is that the local phone company is hitting up my business to renew our Yellow Pages ad. I understand that the SDMB is hardly an unbiased group of Luddites, but I’m still curious as to whether that ad is worth spending money on.
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What type of business do you have?
I’d base my decision on the age group / demographic I’m trying to reach.
I haven’t used one to look up a number since I moved out for college ten years ago, but I do collect the ones left on my step to use the pages as wrapping paper. I think it looks neat to give someone a gift wrapped in pages of their name.
I often recommend on discussion boards that people use them , because many tend to not use the 'net as they would use the book.
They don’t go to a search engine and seek “cheese shop” and “Atlanta”, they go to a discussion board and ask 'Where can I find a cheese shop in Atlanta"
kjbrasda says “its usually faster to find numbers in the book than online” which is absolutely true. Heck, I can find an item in an alphabetical list faster than I can walk upstairs to the computer, let alone start it, access a search engine, input data and actually find what I am looking for. Try inputting a doctor’s name into a search engine and see how ‘quickly’ his phone numer appears to you.
Yeah, what’s up with that? Doctors seem to be the exception to the rule. Weirdest thing happened a month ago…I googled a doctor’s name because my patient told me she’d switched doctors and I had to call him. His personal cell phone number was the first hit. WTF? I never was able to find his practice information, not by google, not by the NPI registry, not by any of the doctor aggregation sites. I was so embarrassed when I realized I’d dialed his personal cell - huge faux pas in the home health industry! But hey, Doc, it’s right there on google! Might wanna fix that!
'Cept for doctors, though, I’d rather use the internet.
I use them every day. Specifically I use them as supports for my mouse mat, to raise it to a comfortable level for the way I sit when using my “desktop” computer.
I recently got home to find three of the same phone book scattered around my house. One on the front porch, one in the driveway, and one at the mailbox, not mind you, in the mailbox, but in the slush at the foot of the mailbox.
I then proceeded to call up the company (Haines?) and leave a very nasty message on their machine about littering in my yard.
Up until a couple of years ago, we’d get several different phone books over the course of the year (one from AT&T, the others from different vendors). I think we got a new AT&T one a few months ago, but I think that the others have ceased to be.
I hang onto the phone book out of inertia, I suppose (and always replace the old one with the new one when I get it). But, I suspect I’ve used it no more than a handful of times in the past 2-3 years.
The reason I ask, in case you care, is that the local phone company is hitting up my business to renew our Yellow Pages ad. I understand that the SDMB is hardly an unbiased group of Luddites, but I’m still curious as to whether that ad is worth spending money on.
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I also own a business. A retail business. When I opened it in 2004 I went into 2 books with the smallest ad that was bigger than a straight listing to the tune of about $360/month. After a year I cut back to one book. And two years later let go of yellow pages entirely.
I ask every single new customer how they found my shop and the number who ever said “yellow pages” is negligible.
At the same time I made a commitment to more actively market in any free way I can so I can’t tell you if I lost folks by not being in phone books. My sales figures follow the general economic trends. I think the summer of $4.20 gas hurt me more than not being in the phone book.
One factor that is true for my business which may not be true for yours is that my draw is generally from a very small geographic area. 85-90% of my customers live within three miles of my store. People trying to sell me yellow page ads (or ValPak, or Clipper Magazine or…) like to tell me how my ad will go into 50,000 homes in 6 zip codes. 48,000 of them would never come to me no matter what. If I have $500 to spend on advertising it makes more sense for me to spend $1/piece on very targeted direct mail than to cast my net too wide like that.
I’ve gotten better return from attending Chamber events and advertising in local school sports and drama programs.
