Once upon a time almost all payphones were 25 cents for a unlimited local call. Then people began carrying calling cards from their local and long-distance carriers. I used to have a U S West Communications card and Sprint FON Card. The former was used primarily to make local calls from payphones, for which U S West billed me 50 cents per call in a next phone bill. The latter could be used even from abroad, and for a few times I made calls from Japan (for about $8.50, far less at the time than a typical rate from a Japanese carrier such as KDDI). People back then used payphones, as mobile phones were still expensive, BIG, rare and difficult to buy, and people used to have a little thing called pager which displayed numbers. As soon as I moved to Portland from Seattle just about 15 years ago, I saw an ad in the Willamette Week by a company called Cook Paging Co. on Barbur Boulevard (the building is still there sitting empty), so I took my Seattle pager there and a few days later it was converted ("recrystalized") into a Portland pager with a Portland number. Back then, a Portland pager could be used only between Longview, Washington and Corvallis, Oregon along Interstate 5 (my first cell phone, Audiovox 480, was analog and it was still like that when I bought one in 2000 from Airtouch Wireless -- in a few months Airtouch became Verizon Wireless and converted everything into the national CDMA digital network, necessitating me to purchase a new and much much smaller Kyocera handset).
Payphones were being pushed out of business slowly because of the increasing popularity of prepaid phone cards and phone company credit cards. At the time payphone operators received nothing when someone called a toll-free number to connect to the card access. FCC responded to this by imposing a fee on all toll-free calls made from payphones, to reinburse the payphone operators. Around the same time, payphone operators raised the price from 25 cents to 35 cents, and soon thereafter, to 50 cents. A few years ago, I began seeing a few 75-cent payphones at the Pioneer Place mall downtown, but now they are back to 50 cents.
In Portland, even to this day, we have more payphones than in most other major cities in North America. The death of payphones began as mobile phones became near universal. As early as around 2002, many people opted for having a cell phone as their primary phones, ditching their landlines due to the higher cost and their switching of their Internet access from dial-up (for which a landline with unlimited/unmeasured local call was necessary) to cable (Excite@Home-turned-AT&T Broadband-turned-Comcast-turned-XFINITY). The last time I had a landline was in early 2001. The death of payphones only began an escalation trend when FCC repealed the requirement that a local carrier must provide at least two payphones per each exchange (an exchange is the second set of your phone number). Back in 2001, I still had an incentive to use a payphone for a longer phone call as I was paying Airtouch 60 cents a minute. Now most plans are unlimited or flat-rate, and even measured plans for low-end users are about 10 cents a minute.
But there are at least two 25-cent payphones still exist in Portland, where the dream of the 1990s is still alive. There used to be a few more until relatively recently, but now I know only of two.
- Belmont 34 Grocery across from Stumptown Coffee, SE 34th Avenue at SE Belmont Street
- Plaid Pantry, at the corner of NE 16th Avenue and NE Broadway
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