…or parking meters come to that.
I’ve never seen anyone emptying these, are they emptied during the night or what?
Locally, the meter maids emptied the parking meters, until a local contractor offered to do it for less.
I suspect phone company dudes, or contractors thereof account for the phones…if there are any payphones left.
I work the Midnight to 8AM shift as a guard at a factory. There’s a payphone across the hall from my office that I’ve never seen emptied in the 7 years I’ve worked there. The phone is in view of one of the cameras. I’ll review the video tonight and report back if the phone had been emptied at all in the past 2 weeks.
I’m glad you asked!
I used to empty phones! 
Yes, and legally. It comes down to who owns the phones. The ones I emptied were owned / run by a professional businessman / entrepeneur who leased the phones from (I believe) AT&T. Every week we’d put together a route, and drive around Chicago in his station wagon. We’d hit an address, I’d hop out with a bag and the keys (you need two) to open the coin area of the phone. Dump the coins in the bag, slap a label in so we’d know which phone was putting out which change, check to see the phone was ‘in-order’, then close it up and drive off to the next phone. Easy peasy.
I got paid, no pun intended, chump change. But I liked my boss, and it was fun just driving around the city, getting weird looks as I’d pop the phones open.
Well payphones in the UK are owned by BT and in all my 67 years on this ball of mud I’ve yet to see one being emptied, same with parking meters.
I don’t mean that BT own the meters o’course
I’ve seen meters being emptied. The money is never exposed - the change holder is removed from the meter, and placed in the opening of a cart, which then opens a door and dumps the money. The meter tender hauls the cart from meter to meter.
They still have pay phones?? I don’t think I’ve used one for 20 years, and I make a lot of calls.
A guy I work with told me he used to empty them out with baseball bats when he was a punk in his twenties years ago. 
BT are going over to card phones, which removes the need for coin collection.
Was his name Cool Hand Luke?
Funny you should mention it, he said he also terrorized parking meters too.
I’ve seen parking meters being empties. The meter maid comes along with a sort of rolling safe with a funnel at the top. She opens the meter and the coins fall into the funnel, then she moves to the next.
All well and good but could he eat 50 hard boiled eggs in one sitting?
In Greece all the pay-phones are already card phones. Which, I’m sure, is great for the profits of phone companies. However, for the non-native who needs to make a single phone call it really isn’t that great.
My county has a lot of Amish residents, so we not only have pay phones all around, they’re in honest-to-goodness phone booths! There’s such a booth less than a quarter mile from my house!
I think that payphones will eventually vanish given that most people now have mobiles.
ArrMatey, did you ever worry about getting robbed or mugged? Did you work alone or with a partner to prevent such incidents? How much money was there usually in each coin box?
I don’t know about now but when I left New Zealand in 2000, there were very few, if any, coin phones left. The more usual way of paying is with a prepaid swipe card that you buy at a local store. One big advantage of cards is that nobody needs to waste energy travelling around collecting coins.
I worked with the boss, who did the driving. I’m a pretty big guy, he was a pretty big guy. We drove the routes that his less-intimidating-looking employee didn’t want to drive. I dunno… Only trouble we ever got was due to bar owners who thought their cut should be bigger shrug. I was never more than like 15 feet from the car (except in one bowling alley), so I never really considered it a problem; someone would have to be lying-in-wait for me, and as we didn’t have any real ‘fixed’ schedule, it’d have been a lot of work for a bunch of change.
As for how much… Depends heavilly on the phone and the neighborhood. There were bars that had maybe a buck in them a week, and places that had maybe fifty, seventy bucks in a phone. Generally the two biggest draws were: Low-income neighborhoods (no idea why, it just was), and the bowling alley (again, no idea why, but we had six phones there, and they were always jam-packed).