Old habits die hard for some folks. I often kid my parents about how, even though they now have a 2.4 GHz cordless phone with a range of something like 3000 feet, they still stand in the kitchen to talk on the phone.
I asked my supervisor about that back in the 70’s. Why’d we charge for it, even if it was cheaper for us? Because people were willing to pay for it.
You can’t beat Lily Tomlin’s succint explanation (as Ernestine): “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the PHONE COMPANY.” Not really true at the level I worked at, but still… It was a monopoly. If you thought we were overpriced or had treated you badly or whatever, there wasn’t much you could do about it. There was nowhere else to get the service. You could complain to the state utility regulators, but heck, government agencies made the phone company look good in comparison.
But it wasn’t cheaper for them, not at first. The phone company had to pay for installing all the new CO equipment to deal with touch-tone dialing. And the cost of maintaining the research labs that came up with the ideas & developed the equipment.
In fact, the pulse dialing was probably cheaper at first, because all those banks of clicking relay switches had been paid for many years before, while the new tone dialing stuff is current money being spent. It’s only later, after the initial investment in new equipment is cover that the reduction in maintenance makes it cheaper.
Almost anything new goes through a period where they charge for it, even though the supplier recognizes that in the future, it will be cheaper & more efficient. Way back when, you paid extra to have one of those new-fangled direct dial phones, instead of just having the operator connect you, the way it had always been done.
Heh. That’s not that much less than what I pay now. Must have been a lot back then.
1968-1973 minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. In the early 1960s it was less than $1.25 per hour; Southwestern Bell would often refuse to install a telephone for a young person just out of school due a lack of credit history. If that young person fell for the sales pitch of the Southwestern Bell service rep and agreed to have two (or more) phones, the credit history problem would disappear. The only recourse if one didn’t fall for the sales pitch was to have one’s parents co-sign the credit agreement.
The cable TV people were the same; if you wanted a second TV you had to have them install the cable and you paid extra for the service. Installing your own cable splitter was illegal and viewed as a form of piracy at the time.