August 5, 2026 • 15 mins
Once upon a time there were these things called phone books. Inside you could find the phone number and address of just about everyone in your town. Can you imagine?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh, Chuck, cherit, Dave,
let's go nostalgic.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right. I mean, there's a slew of websites you
used to research this, but I mean, honestly, we could
just say from our own brains because there wasn't a
lot in here that like, we just didn't know as
growing up in the time that we grow up again
because it is about phone books, and if you're of
a certain age, you know exactly what we're talking about.
If you're not of a certain age yet, you might
(00:32):
be surprised to know that. At a certain point in time,
if you wanted to, I don't know, take your car
to the shop or find a florist or a dry cleaner,
you couldn't just go on the internet to do that
or whip out your phone. You would bring out a
seventeen pound book that was eight inches thick, drop it
(00:52):
on your kitchen table and wake up your entire family
on a Saturday morning, and you would start letting your oh,
I'm not going to say it. You would start thumbing
through that thing, looking under the florists section or the
laundromat section to find a business to give your money
to Yeah, it's very cute.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
That is how you found businesses. It's how you found
people too, because the business part was in the second
half of the phone book. It was all in yellow pages.
The first part was white pages, and those were residential listings.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, or they were two different books entirely.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It could be if you lived in a fancy pants area,
you know, like Atlanta, like Westchester or something like that. Yeah,
the white pages. This is another thing. The reason I
love doing this one, Chuck, is because this is to
me the first time we can be like you have
grown up in a world where you can't really understand
(01:50):
the world that this thing existed in in Shakesure. This
is a great example of it. And one of the
things that stuck out to me was explaining the white pages,
where you you could go and say, I'm looking for
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So I'm going to go to
the B's of the white pages and start looking through
the Bryan's until I find all the Charles. And I
know Chuck lives in Atlanta, so I'm going to find
(02:12):
Chuck's address in Atlanta, and then at the end of
that is Chuck's phone number and I'm going to pick
up my phone and dial the numbers that is in
this publicly available book. Maybe even I'll get tired of
waiting the for him to answer, I'll hang up and
just drive to his house, which I now know exactly
where it is, because his address is listed under his
full name with his phone number in the phone book,
(02:35):
along with everybody else in town.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, and you would just knock on my door if
you wanted to speak to me. And I know that
we were sending a large number of our listeners into
a complete and utter panic. Yeah, at the thought of
someone knocking on their door just to pop in and
say hello or whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
But just think about how much the world has changed
in that respect.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Oh yeah, you don't even call someone anymore without texting
him to say, can I call right now? No, it's
very strange.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
It is. This is a different world.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
It was a totally different world. The uh well, you know,
another funny tangent to that is, I also remember a
day where if you were like, let's say, you knew
someone's name, but you didn't really know where they lived,
and you didn't know them that well, so you needed
their phone number, so you looked it up and they
were like six Josh Clark's and you would start calling
(03:25):
random Josh Clark's and say, are you the Josh Clark
that I met at camp summer camp this summer or
the parents of so like you would go like, you know,
that's the whole plot of the Initial Terminators. He's killing
random Sarah Connors. Oh yeah, because he looks up Sarah
Connor in the phone book.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, but you would totally do that. I did that too.
I mean like you would do something like that and
it was and.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
People understood would be like, oh, that's a different guy.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Sorry, good luck, good luck.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Oh man, so quaint and this is not like three
hundred years ago. The other thing I did not know.
Actually when I said, I knew all this in my
brain and it totally makes sense now all this. You know,
the businesses themselves were advertised within the floral section or
the laundromat section. And that's why you would see like
a one plumber or a one florist is because they
(04:14):
would be listed first. I never knew that, and I
feel like a dummy because it's so obvious.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Oh no, I mean like that's but yeah, that's what
I would call my business we should have called this
a one stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Podcast, right, A one podcast?
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Right? Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. It was called
gaming the system. I think that's right. So for about
one hundred years, like this is how you made contact
with the outside world. This is how you searched for
things in the outside world. It's really hard to wrap
your head around now, but you just pull a book
out and I say, we take a little break, come
(04:49):
back and talk a little more about the history of
the phone book after well this break, let's do it. Well,
now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh
pm Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
It's stuff you should.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Know, all right, All right, we're back. We're talking phone books.
The first phone directory we talked a little bit about
(05:27):
in our Telephone episode. I think it was published in
eighteen seventy eight New Haven, Connecticut and had about fifty
subscribers that's what they were called at the time, on
a single piece of paper, listed as phones, you know,
spread around. Obviously, the phone book got bigger and bigger,
to the point where, like I mentioned, we had a
full white pages and a full yellow pages, and they
(05:47):
were very big books. I think the last editions of
the New York City. Well maybe not the last, because
there are still phone books if you have a landline,
believe it or not, But the New York City phone
books came in multiple volumes at the last quarter of
the twentieth century, and they were so thick that like,
if you were a kid in high school, you might
have a strong person team come around to do a
(06:10):
little show for you at an afternoon assembly, and inevitably
they would blow up a hot water bottle and burst
it and till it burst, and they would somebody would
rip a phone book in half, which was seemingly really
hard to do.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay, I do I have no recollection of seeing an
assembly like that, Like did you see that? It sounds like,
oh yeah, that's a first hand to count.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah. Yeah, we had a strong strong man team come
around and do like feats of strength for the high
school afternoon.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Did they like legitimize it by just saying like, also
don't do drugs at the end? Oh?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Probably?
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, Wow, that's really something. Yeah, I don't remember we
I don't remember anything like that.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Where'd you think they ripped up phone books? Just like
that's incredible or whatever?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I got to see it live. Buddy.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Wow, go Redan hs. That's right, the Redan Redheads.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yeah, the Raiders.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
That was close. Yeah. So one of the things like
if you were if you had a phone, like you
just got a phone book, it was free, like they
were disposable, Like you just thought nothing of the phone book.
But it turns out they were like big, big business
for AT and T and then later on for a
bunch of other companies, but AT and T, according to
(07:27):
a nineteen eighty six article. The article said that eighteen
T made seven billion dollars just off of the money
it charged businesses across the country to be listed in
the Yellow Pages. And that's like thirteen billion dollars today.
That's a lot. That's like lunch at Apple.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, I mean there's a ton of money. And I
even looked up. I was like, I wonder if there
was a sort of a weird little hidden search charge
for like the customer to be listed. And apparently not.
Apparently you were never ever charged to be listed in
the phone book. You did have to pay to get unlisted,
which a lot of states eventually like introduced like house
(08:08):
bills and stuff. They're like this is a scam. You
can't just list somebody's name and address and say you
got to pay us to not do that extortion. Yeah,
so I think a lot of those ended up being successful.
But you know, AT and T was selling those not
only just a spot in the Yellow Pages, but you
could pay a lot more money to get like larger
ads and stuff in the Yellow Pages to get more notice,
(08:30):
and they would market that stuff. And you know almost
said it earlier, but I didn't want to let it slip.
But a very famous one it was in nineteen sixty two.
I could have sworn it was the seventies, because it
clearly went through the seventies was let your Fingers do
the Walking ad campaign, the idea of, hey, let your
fingers do the walking instead of your body, Like, don't
walk around downtown looking for your florist, just let your
(08:53):
fingers do that and then give them a call instead, exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And I mean that was kind of revolutionary as far
as things went, at least in the mid century. And
I said that AT and T made a bunch of
money off of the Yellow Pages. The reason why it
was just them is because they had a monopoly on
the phone system in the US, which I'm sure we
covered as well in that phone exchange up. So, but
it was finally broken up. The government granted monopoly. They're like,
(09:20):
you guys are too big. We're going to break you
up into regional providers like Northwestern Bell, Southern Bell, that
kind of stuff. And so all of those companies, these
subcompanies now were printing Yellow Pages and they were making money.
But because Bell no longer had a monopoly, that also
opened the door for private companies to start making their
(09:40):
own Yellow Pages. There was just a lot of money
and walking around because this is how people found businesses.
It was either driving past and seeing a business that
had their phone number on the sign, or you went
to the Yellow Pages. It was as simple as that.
So you had a lot of incentive to advertise in
the yellow Pages, and so companies had a lot of
(10:01):
incentive to publish Yellow Pages. And so the number of
phone books that came to one person's house started to boom.
I think in the nineteen nineties in some parts of California,
you might get ten different phone books delivered to your
house every night. Year. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, And you know, obviously, especially in a place like California,
or you know, Washington State, Seattle, Washington. People would be like, hey,
wait a minute, this is like a pretty awful thing
to do, like the amount of waste that's happening here.
I remember early I mean this is a long time
ago now, but not that long ago. But the Internet
(10:38):
was around, and there were still phone books being delivered,
and I remember seeing a comedian joke about I think
the joke was something up printing a small portion of
the Internet and throwing it on my porch once a year.
I thought that was pretty funny. But everyone, you know,
it's pretty clear, like what a wasteful thing. I think
half a billion phone books were being delivered six hundred
and fifty thousand tons of paper every year by nineteen
(10:59):
ninety one, enough to fill up two million cubic yards
of landfill space, even though you could probably recycle that stuff.
So they initially started doing like recycled paper and stuff
like that. Seattle, like I mentioned, I think was one
of the first ones to say, like, you know, we're
gonna start charging phone book makers fourteen since per phone
(11:19):
book delivered within the city. And if people elect to
not have a phone book, but they still throw one
on your porch, like that's a one hundred and fifty
dollars five Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Knowing me, justice police, I would have been I would
have immediately gone to the trouble of filling out like
the five page form to complain, to make sure that
that company got fined out.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I totally would. Yeah, I opted out.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
You've got a touch of the justice police in Youtuo
for youah for sure?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah? Yeah neither. Yeah. We don't like bad guys getting
away with stuff justice. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
So despite the environmental thing, I think basically converting to
recycled paper helped a lot of people in training. People
like you said, like these things can actually be easily recycled.
That kind of simmered people down about the environmental part.
So that's not what did away with phone books. There
were like three things in pretty quick secession that really
(12:11):
started to take the Yellow Pages down at least so
four on one that was information all of a sudden,
you could dial that for free starting in the eighties,
and now you didn't even have to look in the
phone book. You could just call up and be like,
just start reading some plumbers' names off to me in
their phone numbers.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Yeah, you would call someone to read you the phone exactly,
that's right. And then, of course, you know, the Internet
coming along had everything to do with it. And also
in two thousand and four, Congress passed a law that
said you can't put cell phone numbers in phone books,
so they were on the way to doing that. So
it basically was whittled down to just landlines. And then
(12:52):
once the Internet came around, as far as businesses go,
the Yellow Pages wasn't as necessary. But you know they're
all still around because there are still landlines. And you
know who advertises in the Yellow Pages? Still who ricks
in a bogan? Emily's dad and Seneco Glass, his auto
glass repair shop in Cayuga Falls, Ohio. Unless it's changed.
(13:16):
We were talking one day and he was like, yeah,
I still advertise in the Yellow Pages. A lot of
people around here still use landlines, still look stuff up
in the Yellow Pages.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah. There was a poll that found, I think in
twenty twenty four, more than fifty million homes in the
US still have a landline. So that means that unless
they go to the trouble of opting out, they still
get a phone book delivered to them every year, and
that ten percent of all Americans still use Yellow Pages
If you just zero in on fifty five and older,
(13:44):
almost three quarters of them use the Yellow Pages to
find business like old habits die hard. So like your
father in laws, like, he has an incentive to still
sure advertising the Yellow Pages, which means there's an incentive
for Yellow Pages to still exist as long as people
use them. You know.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, I'm What I'm really mad about is I'm now
in the age group where they're like, but this is
what the olds are doing, right, freaking yellow Pages. Come on, nobody.
I know my age looks in the Yellow Pages, So
I take issue with that number.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
You're a twenty six percenter.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, I guess so. But I have to say, if
you're looking for autoglass repair in the Cayuga Falls, Ohio region,
and you want to avoid big Auto glass, go with
the mom and popper in this case, the pop and
go check out Seneco Glass. Tell Rick we sent you.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Very nice man.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
They do great work.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
I can't think of any better way for short stuff
to be out.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
That's right, We're out. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh, Chuck, cherit, Dave,
let's go nostalgic.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right. I mean, there's a slew of websites you
used to research this, but I mean, honestly, we could
just say from our own brains because there wasn't a
lot in here that like, we just didn't know as
growing up in the time that we grow up again
because it is about phone books, and if you're of
a certain age, you know exactly what we're talking about.
If you're not of a certain age yet, you might
(00:32):
be surprised to know that. At a certain point in time,
if you wanted to, I don't know, take your car
to the shop or find a florist or a dry cleaner,
you couldn't just go on the internet to do that
or whip out your phone. You would bring out a
seventeen pound book that was eight inches thick, drop it
(00:52):
on your kitchen table and wake up your entire family
on a Saturday morning, and you would start letting your oh,
I'm not going to say it. You would start thumbing
through that thing, looking under the florists section or the
laundromat section to find a business to give your money
to Yeah, it's very cute.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
That is how you found businesses. It's how you found
people too, because the business part was in the second
half of the phone book. It was all in yellow pages.
The first part was white pages, and those were residential listings.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, or they were two different books entirely.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It could be if you lived in a fancy pants area,
you know, like Atlanta, like Westchester or something like that. Yeah,
the white pages. This is another thing. The reason I
love doing this one, Chuck, is because this is to
me the first time we can be like you have
grown up in a world where you can't really understand
(01:50):
the world that this thing existed in in Shakesure. This
is a great example of it. And one of the
things that stuck out to me was explaining the white pages,
where you you could go and say, I'm looking for
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So I'm going to go to
the B's of the white pages and start looking through
the Bryan's until I find all the Charles. And I
know Chuck lives in Atlanta, so I'm going to find
(02:12):
Chuck's address in Atlanta, and then at the end of
that is Chuck's phone number and I'm going to pick
up my phone and dial the numbers that is in
this publicly available book. Maybe even I'll get tired of
waiting the for him to answer, I'll hang up and
just drive to his house, which I now know exactly
where it is, because his address is listed under his
full name with his phone number in the phone book,
(02:35):
along with everybody else in town.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, and you would just knock on my door if
you wanted to speak to me. And I know that
we were sending a large number of our listeners into
a complete and utter panic. Yeah, at the thought of
someone knocking on their door just to pop in and
say hello or whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
But just think about how much the world has changed
in that respect.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Oh yeah, you don't even call someone anymore without texting
him to say, can I call right now? No, it's
very strange.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
It is. This is a different world.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
It was a totally different world. The uh well, you know,
another funny tangent to that is, I also remember a
day where if you were like, let's say, you knew
someone's name, but you didn't really know where they lived,
and you didn't know them that well, so you needed
their phone number, so you looked it up and they
were like six Josh Clark's and you would start calling
(03:25):
random Josh Clark's and say, are you the Josh Clark
that I met at camp summer camp this summer or
the parents of so like you would go like, you know,
that's the whole plot of the Initial Terminators. He's killing
random Sarah Connors. Oh yeah, because he looks up Sarah
Connor in the phone book.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, but you would totally do that. I did that too.
I mean like you would do something like that and
it was and.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
People understood would be like, oh, that's a different guy.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Sorry, good luck, good luck.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Oh man, so quaint and this is not like three
hundred years ago. The other thing I did not know.
Actually when I said, I knew all this in my
brain and it totally makes sense now all this. You know,
the businesses themselves were advertised within the floral section or
the laundromat section. And that's why you would see like
a one plumber or a one florist is because they
(04:14):
would be listed first. I never knew that, and I
feel like a dummy because it's so obvious.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Oh no, I mean like that's but yeah, that's what
I would call my business we should have called this
a one stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Podcast, right, A one podcast?
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Right? Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. It was called
gaming the system. I think that's right. So for about
one hundred years, like this is how you made contact
with the outside world. This is how you searched for
things in the outside world. It's really hard to wrap
your head around now, but you just pull a book
out and I say, we take a little break, come
(04:49):
back and talk a little more about the history of
the phone book after well this break, let's do it. Well,
now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh
pm Chuck.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
It's stuff you should.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Know, all right, All right, we're back. We're talking phone books.
The first phone directory we talked a little bit about
(05:27):
in our Telephone episode. I think it was published in
eighteen seventy eight New Haven, Connecticut and had about fifty
subscribers that's what they were called at the time, on
a single piece of paper, listed as phones, you know,
spread around. Obviously, the phone book got bigger and bigger,
to the point where, like I mentioned, we had a
full white pages and a full yellow pages, and they
(05:47):
were very big books. I think the last editions of
the New York City. Well maybe not the last, because
there are still phone books if you have a landline,
believe it or not, But the New York City phone
books came in multiple volumes at the last quarter of
the twentieth century, and they were so thick that like,
if you were a kid in high school, you might
have a strong person team come around to do a
(06:10):
little show for you at an afternoon assembly, and inevitably
they would blow up a hot water bottle and burst
it and till it burst, and they would somebody would
rip a phone book in half, which was seemingly really
hard to do.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay, I do I have no recollection of seeing an
assembly like that, Like did you see that? It sounds like,
oh yeah, that's a first hand to count.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah. Yeah, we had a strong strong man team come
around and do like feats of strength for the high
school afternoon.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Did they like legitimize it by just saying like, also
don't do drugs at the end? Oh?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Probably?
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, Wow, that's really something. Yeah, I don't remember we
I don't remember anything like that.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Where'd you think they ripped up phone books? Just like
that's incredible or whatever?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I got to see it live. Buddy.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Wow, go Redan hs. That's right, the Redan Redheads.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yeah, the Raiders.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
That was close. Yeah. So one of the things like
if you were if you had a phone, like you
just got a phone book, it was free, like they
were disposable, Like you just thought nothing of the phone book.
But it turns out they were like big, big business
for AT and T and then later on for a
bunch of other companies, but AT and T, according to
(07:27):
a nineteen eighty six article. The article said that eighteen
T made seven billion dollars just off of the money
it charged businesses across the country to be listed in
the Yellow Pages. And that's like thirteen billion dollars today.
That's a lot. That's like lunch at Apple.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, I mean there's a ton of money. And I
even looked up. I was like, I wonder if there
was a sort of a weird little hidden search charge
for like the customer to be listed. And apparently not.
Apparently you were never ever charged to be listed in
the phone book. You did have to pay to get unlisted,
which a lot of states eventually like introduced like house
(08:08):
bills and stuff. They're like this is a scam. You
can't just list somebody's name and address and say you
got to pay us to not do that extortion. Yeah,
so I think a lot of those ended up being successful.
But you know, AT and T was selling those not
only just a spot in the Yellow Pages, but you
could pay a lot more money to get like larger
ads and stuff in the Yellow Pages to get more notice,
(08:30):
and they would market that stuff. And you know almost
said it earlier, but I didn't want to let it slip.
But a very famous one it was in nineteen sixty two.
I could have sworn it was the seventies, because it
clearly went through the seventies was let your Fingers do
the Walking ad campaign, the idea of, hey, let your
fingers do the walking instead of your body, Like, don't
walk around downtown looking for your florist, just let your
(08:53):
fingers do that and then give them a call instead, exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And I mean that was kind of revolutionary as far
as things went, at least in the mid century. And
I said that AT and T made a bunch of
money off of the Yellow Pages. The reason why it
was just them is because they had a monopoly on
the phone system in the US, which I'm sure we
covered as well in that phone exchange up. So, but
it was finally broken up. The government granted monopoly. They're like,
(09:20):
you guys are too big. We're going to break you
up into regional providers like Northwestern Bell, Southern Bell, that
kind of stuff. And so all of those companies, these
subcompanies now were printing Yellow Pages and they were making money.
But because Bell no longer had a monopoly, that also
opened the door for private companies to start making their
(09:40):
own Yellow Pages. There was just a lot of money
and walking around because this is how people found businesses.
It was either driving past and seeing a business that
had their phone number on the sign, or you went
to the Yellow Pages. It was as simple as that.
So you had a lot of incentive to advertise in
the yellow Pages, and so companies had a lot of
(10:01):
incentive to publish Yellow Pages. And so the number of
phone books that came to one person's house started to boom.
I think in the nineteen nineties in some parts of California,
you might get ten different phone books delivered to your
house every night. Year. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, And you know, obviously, especially in a place like California,
or you know, Washington State, Seattle, Washington. People would be like, hey,
wait a minute, this is like a pretty awful thing
to do, like the amount of waste that's happening here.
I remember early I mean this is a long time
ago now, but not that long ago. But the Internet
(10:38):
was around, and there were still phone books being delivered,
and I remember seeing a comedian joke about I think
the joke was something up printing a small portion of
the Internet and throwing it on my porch once a year.
I thought that was pretty funny. But everyone, you know,
it's pretty clear, like what a wasteful thing. I think
half a billion phone books were being delivered six hundred
and fifty thousand tons of paper every year by nineteen
(10:59):
ninety one, enough to fill up two million cubic yards
of landfill space, even though you could probably recycle that stuff.
So they initially started doing like recycled paper and stuff
like that. Seattle, like I mentioned, I think was one
of the first ones to say, like, you know, we're
gonna start charging phone book makers fourteen since per phone
(11:19):
book delivered within the city. And if people elect to
not have a phone book, but they still throw one
on your porch, like that's a one hundred and fifty
dollars five Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Knowing me, justice police, I would have been I would
have immediately gone to the trouble of filling out like
the five page form to complain, to make sure that
that company got fined out.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I totally would. Yeah, I opted out.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
You've got a touch of the justice police in Youtuo
for youah for sure?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah? Yeah neither. Yeah. We don't like bad guys getting
away with stuff justice. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
So despite the environmental thing, I think basically converting to
recycled paper helped a lot of people in training. People
like you said, like these things can actually be easily recycled.
That kind of simmered people down about the environmental part.
So that's not what did away with phone books. There
were like three things in pretty quick secession that really
(12:11):
started to take the Yellow Pages down at least so
four on one that was information all of a sudden,
you could dial that for free starting in the eighties,
and now you didn't even have to look in the
phone book. You could just call up and be like,
just start reading some plumbers' names off to me in
their phone numbers.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Yeah, you would call someone to read you the phone exactly,
that's right. And then, of course, you know, the Internet
coming along had everything to do with it. And also
in two thousand and four, Congress passed a law that
said you can't put cell phone numbers in phone books,
so they were on the way to doing that. So
it basically was whittled down to just landlines. And then
(12:52):
once the Internet came around, as far as businesses go,
the Yellow Pages wasn't as necessary. But you know they're
all still around because there are still landlines. And you
know who advertises in the Yellow Pages? Still who ricks
in a bogan? Emily's dad and Seneco Glass, his auto
glass repair shop in Cayuga Falls, Ohio. Unless it's changed.
(13:16):
We were talking one day and he was like, yeah,
I still advertise in the Yellow Pages. A lot of
people around here still use landlines, still look stuff up
in the Yellow Pages.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Yeah. There was a poll that found, I think in
twenty twenty four, more than fifty million homes in the
US still have a landline. So that means that unless
they go to the trouble of opting out, they still
get a phone book delivered to them every year, and
that ten percent of all Americans still use Yellow Pages
If you just zero in on fifty five and older,
(13:44):
almost three quarters of them use the Yellow Pages to
find business like old habits die hard. So like your
father in laws, like, he has an incentive to still
sure advertising the Yellow Pages, which means there's an incentive
for Yellow Pages to still exist as long as people
use them. You know.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, I'm What I'm really mad about is I'm now
in the age group where they're like, but this is
what the olds are doing, right, freaking yellow Pages. Come on, nobody.
I know my age looks in the Yellow Pages, So
I take issue with that number.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
You're a twenty six percenter.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, I guess so. But I have to say, if
you're looking for autoglass repair in the Cayuga Falls, Ohio region,
and you want to avoid big Auto glass, go with
the mom and popper in this case, the pop and
go check out Seneco Glass. Tell Rick we sent you.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Very nice man.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
They do great work.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
I can't think of any better way for short stuff
to be out.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
That's right, We're out. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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