Cellular use zaps pay phones

After reaching a high of 2.1 million in 1999, the number of pay phones in the United States has decreased by 29 percent to 1.5 million, while the number of cell phone users has climbed to 160 million, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

“You can hardly look out the window without seeing people with a cell phone in their ear, so they don’t really need to pull over and grab a pay phone anymore like they used to,” said Pat Bly, regional director for SBC in Springfield.

SBJ owns the majority of pay phones in and around Springfield, but the company isn’t saying how many of its pay phones still exist or how many used to ring during the pay phone’s heyday.

In 2001, SBC began removing low-performing pay phones.

Six SBC pay phones remain in the common areas of Battlefield Mall.

“We have had a decrease in them in recent years, and it’s due to cell phone usage,” said Christine Moses, director of mall marketing. Information on the previous number of pay phones at the mall was not available.

Officials in the telephone industry doubt that the pay phone will completely disappear. Cell phone users might find themselves in need of a pay phone when a signal is weak or a battery dies, and pay phones are relied upon by the 6.5 percent of American households that the FCC estimates don’t have a telephone.

“Pay phones were designed to serve what we call ‘people in motion,’ but so were cell phones,” said Jim Smith, media relations representative for Verizon. “The idea is if they don’t need a pay phone on every corner, then let’s at least have pay phones where people do need them, and that ends up being places like train stations, airports, street corners, malls, things like that.”

Cell phones are now more easily accessible, even for the demographic that traditionally hasn’t been able to pass the credit check. Prepaid plans are a popular alternative, said Roy Birdsong, owner of Choose Your Own Wireless, but many prepaid customers don’t renew their plans.

“These people that can’t get cell phones have generally messed their credit up,” Birdsong said, adding that prepaid customers tend to fall behind on payments, which shuts the phone off. Going over the purchased amount of minutes also will cause the phone to shut down, and the customer will lose that phone number.

Verizon is no longer a provider of residential landlines in Missouri, but the company does have about 134 pay phones statewide, mostly in the southeast, Smith said.

“The decline has started to level off, so maybe we’ve got them where people need them now,” he added. “There’s still gold in them there hills.”

No longer the moneymaker they once were, pay phones are still operated by SBC.

“We’re still in the business, but it’s more of a service to people, where they need them in certain parts of town, than a profit center for us anymore,” Bly said.

Bly also declined to estimate the cost of operating or maintaining a pay phone, but he said that it used to be “a huge department. We had a coin department. It used to be a big deal because people would go around and open those coin boxes and pull out the dimes and so on, and they did that for years.”

Telephone companies aren’t the only recipients of pay phone revenues.

“We can’t just go around slapping up pay phones on the sides of buildings,” Smith said. “In return for letting a pay phone be on their property, (property owners) get a percentage of the revenue that the pay phone generates.” That commission, he said, varies according to agreements reached with individual site owners.