Get ready to plunk down (if you can plunk anything down on a pay phone) 50¢ for calls from public phones in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, California, Nevada, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Texas and Arkansas.
So lemme get this straight- less demand for pay phones, jack up the price! Yeah that oughtta get people using pay phones again. What happened to the law of supply and demand? If phone cards are allowing people to make calls from pay phones for 15¢ (or whatever - I’ve never used a phone card so I’m not sure what the rate is), how does SBC figure it’ll make a comeback by making pay phones even more expensive - prohibitively expensive for some I’m sure.
I know that if I lived in any of the above states and was a frequent user of pay phones, I’d be seriously looking into getting a phone card now.
WAG–SBC doesn’t think that their market share will ever come back. They are just trying to make up lost revenue. Many pay phones nationwide went to 35cents from 25cents just in the last few years. I’m only surprised they have waited this long to go to 50cents. If they thought that they could lure people back by lowering prices, they would. But it’s a thing of the past.
Here’s how my prepaid phone card works: We in Northern Ohio are fortunate to have a discount drugstore(Marc’s) which sells phone cards which have a 6 cent/minute rate. There is no connection fee or any devious restrictions on how you use the card(as there is with many cards you can buy). But, depending on who owns the phone/system from which you are calling, that company may take some of the time from your pre-paid phone card as a fee. That can vary tremendously. Usually, if I am at someone’s home and calling long-distance with my card, there is no charge. On the road, using a pay-phone, the “connection fee” is nominal from a big carrier(Bell) and sometimes very high from a mom and pop outfit.
I don’t think that having a phone card is gonna keep you from paying 50 cents for your local call. That’s all the increase is about, I think.
Yep, this is GQ, not BBQ. We’ve all done it at some time or another. Mods, do you want to move this?
OTOH, I could have misinterpreted the intent of your post. See #2.
They still have to cover fixed costs and realize a profit. While phone cards are a direct replacement for putting money into a pay phone, both use the same phone. That, or SBC just wants to raise prices.
If pay phones are indeed getting squeezed out by phone cards, then price increases like this will indeed cause more people to use cell phones or phone cards and the cycle will continue until pay phones disappear from the landscape
3. Many non-SBC pay phones already cost $.50. How about the time that my wife paged me and I had to pay fifty cents to call and listen to her gripe about something I did to help her??? Now, that’s fodder for a Pit post!