The End of the Era: Payphones Going Away in the United States

From the early part of the 20th century all the way through the late 1990’s, payphones have been an integral part of the communications infrastructure in the United States. We would use them to call our loved ones when we were traveling or just away from home and the idea of carrying a phone with you was a completely foreign idea. With the proliferation of cell phones in the late 1990’s, that all changed. Payphones became used far less often and thus much less profitable. The number of payphones in the United States has steadily declined for the last 15 years, and now with AT&T’s announcement that they are getting out of the payphone business, commercial payphones are surely on their death bed.

With the vast expansion of the cell phone industry and internet communications, the need for payphones is now a thing of the past. Out of the 300 million people in the United States, over 250 million of them have cell phones! The 50 million Americans that don’t have them are largely children and the elderly who don’t have much of a use for a cellular phone.

One thing we’ll no longer have to worry about with the demise of the payphone as a means of communication in the United States is a crime called “shoulder surfing.” Criminals would take video cameras to airports and pretend to be filming their family and instead be filming travelers enter calling card numbers. The scam artist would then turn around immediately and sell those codes throughout the country within just minutes of filming it. By the time the passenger got to their destination, their card would already be stolen and it’s too late for them to do anything about it.

We won’t have to worry about people stealing our calling card numbers anymore, but these same types of criminals have now moved to just stealing cell phones and using them to make all sorts of expensive international calls, leaving customers with bills of several thousand dollars at the end of the month. One way to reduce the damage if your phone is stolen is to call your cell phone company and have them block international long distance calling, that way any criminal that got a hold of your phone won’t be able to make expensive calls overseas.

Just as we moved from the telegraph to the basic analog phone, we’ve now made another technological leap from traditional analog phones to personal communications devices. With the one of the largest operators of payphones in the United States going out of the business, surely the payphone is going the way of the dodo.