Old pay phones sold as novelty items
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Hugh Bowen poses with his newly-purchased pay phone in the living room of his Conyers, Georgia home.
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ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Old pay phones are selling like they're going out of style.
Collectors have made an online rush to buy BellSouth's boxy old pay phones that have been refurbished for home use, after the Atlanta-based company decided to pull out of a coin-operated phone business that had withered in the wireless age.
"It's a novelty. You just don't usually see pay phones in people's homes," said Hugh Bowen, a retired Atlanta police officer who bought one of the 30-pound phones. "I thought it was so neat and I always wanted one. When I saw this opportunity I jumped on it."
About 500 orders for the $135 phones were filled in the two months they've been for sale, and now there's a waiting list of about 300 more people.
Cell phones have increasingly pushed aside the once-ubiquitous pay phones.
More than six out of 10 Americans now own cell phones, said Patrick Comack, an analyst with Guzman & Co. in Miami. Pay phones have lost so much market share to wireless, it's no longer a moneymaking business, he said.
So the big phones are going the way of rotary phones, crank phones and early model brick-sized cell phones.
When BellSouth became the first major phone company to shutter its languishing pay phone business two years ago, volunteers with the phone company decided to refurbish the phones for home use and resell them to raise money for charity. The phones were rewired so they can plug into a wall outlet and to work without coins.
About $18,000 has been raised from the $35 in profit from each phone, which will go toward groups like Habitat for Humanity and the American Red Cross.
Other companies will continue to operate some pay phones, but their numbers will continue to decrease. The total number of pay phones nationwide has dropped 29.5 percent in the last five years, including a 32.9 percent drop in pay phones operated by local phone companies, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
"My grandchildren and great-grandchildren won't know what it is," said Bill Ray, who bought one of the pay phones and keeps it atop a filing cabinet in his Memphis, Tennessee, BellSouth office. "I thought I'd get it for the nostalgia, and it will be a conversation piece for years to come."
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