Greg's Corner

Pay phones are still making money

There was a time, for those of us old enough to remember, when payphones were everywhere. Shopping malls would have banks of them, busy intersections would have them on the corners and most public places like restaurants would have at least one. Pay phones were the lifeline to home and safety in a world without cell phones. Fast forward to today when finding a pay phone is about as easy as finding Bigfoot, but did you know that pay phones are still making a lot of money?

According to tech blog Motherboard, pay phones in the US and Canada are still making hundreds of millions of dollars even though the profits have been declining steadily over the years. However, the Motherboard post seemed to gloss over the question that’s on everyone’s mind. Who’s still using pay phones?

A lot of people in rural parts of the country where there is no landline or cell phone service are still using pay phones as in many cases it’s their only way of communications. In neighborhoods with a high immigrant population, pay phones are still popular because in most cases it’s cheaper to use a pay phone to call their home country than in it is to use what we might consider a regular phone. Then there are those who just don’t feel the need for a phone. With all the ways we are able to communicate today, how many of us even use the phone function of our cell phones?

While pay phones may be a relic of the past, to a lot of people they are a still a vital lifeline.