Rumblings that Tracfone might be going away from “pay as you go” to a monthly billing cycle, really got me to thinking. I don’t want another monthly bill. I don’t want to be a drone on a phone. I don’t want to be a zombie. I carry a Tracfone essentially to use if my car breaks down. Its for emergencies.
So it started me thinking, “What happened to pay phones?” They were more than a place for Superman to change his clothes. You knew there was going to be one in a mall, near a gas station, at a rest area, inside the K-Mart. When you started driving your parents made sure you had a dime (.15 cents or a quarter depending when you started driving) in case you needed to call home.
More than one teenage girl had the change in her shoe as a option of last resort on a bad date. The phone company of course would say, “Well everybody got cell phones so it was no longer cost effective to have pay phones!” I don’t think so. I think they did away with them to give a nudge for everyone to get cell phones.
I didn’t have a cell phone until 2010. But pay phones had disappeared long before that. In Basic Training there was always a bank of pay phones outside the barracks. You could generally depend on there being a drive-up one near the street at a strip mall. I think I saw pay phones disappear at .35 cents. Maybe .50 cents, I’m not sure.
I know the government wanted them, they can track you. They used this lame excuse about, “Well we have to know where you’re at in case you call 911. Uh huh. Just like they made Detroit put GPS in cars about 20 years ago. “For our own good”.
So now everybody’s got to have a cell phone. I don’t. I can be alone with myself. I don’t have to be electronically entertained. Yeah when they took them out of convenience stores, I knew something was up. They were the last holdout.
I remember the break up of Ma Bell (Northwestern Bell in Iowa) in about 1984. Reagan said it was to breakup a monopoly. Its the only monopoly government has broken up in over a hundred years. I can think of about a dozen they need to breakup, and never will. Its all BS.
So now we’ve thrust another bill onto people, and have bred a generation of zombies. I know the warning bells went off in 1984, just didn’t know why.
Iowa life 
Tracfone forced my husband to upgrade his phone, which was free, but now he has to pay $40.00 a month instead of $10.00 a month. What a rip-off! People liked Tracfone because it was cheaper. Everything is going sky-high under Biden, with no end in sight.
That’s an incredible price increase!
Our phone booths in Australia allow you now to make free calls to landlines across the country.
Interesting. I just found it odd that they would all be removed with such a vengeance. Glad you have a better system.
Yes it is a new thing here that was lsunched in August 2021. You can even ring Telstra mobiles for free using the phone booths. Makes sense when your phone dies and you need to let someone know. A shame they are trashing your ones. Theg are a piece of history.
Oh how I miss phone booths. Never could we imagine that our phone conversations would leap into Krypton.