It's last call for city's pay phones, except at jail

DETROIT -- A pay telephone on a busy Detroit street corner could once net $200 a week in just coins. But that was 30 years ago.

These days, Greg Andrick is lucky to find $5 or $6 in a pay phone's change box every couple months when making his service rounds. His company, Great Lakes Telephone, once operated more than 6,000 rectangular metal pay phones across southeast Michigan. Now it has less than 20, all in government buildings and parks.

"It's really sad. This used to be quite a booming business," said Andrick, who is also president of the still-existing Michigan Pay Telephone Association. "It shriveled up and went slowly away."

Like the typewriter and transistor radio, the pay phone is a once-ubiquitous facet of life whose convenience and business model was outmoded by technology.

Detroit once teemed with working pay phones. The common locations were inside bars and outside gas stations, party stores, bus stops and street corners with foot traffic. Across the state of Michigan, there were roughly 60,000 pay phones in the mid-1980s, according to the pay telephone association.

Now there are 1,400 pay phones registered within the state outside of prisons, although it's unknown how many of these work. There are still 14 listed pay phone carrier companies.

A recent search through Detroit turned up dozens of battered pay phones. Only a handful produced a dial tone.

Some phones were rusty and missing mouthpieces, earpieces or both. A few had lost their entire handset and had naked wires sticking out. One phone was thoroughly mutilated after someone snatched its change box and ripped out the dial pad and cradle hook.

Working phones were found inside, such as at a Greyhound bus station, a district court building and at a casino-hotel. The Detroit Metro Airport reports having about 200 working pay phones, which generated $15,476 in commissions last year.

Scott Hunter, 21, was spotted in the act of making a pay phone call in the Greyhound station. His cellphone had lost its charge and he needed to call his grandmother in Daytona Beach, Fla., with news that his bus would arrive late, he said.

Not accustomed to pay phones, Hunter said he lost 50 cents putting quarters in before first picking up the receiver.

"I was trying to remember how to work it," he said.

Hunter's second attempt was more successful, and he paid 75 cents for a roughly 1-minute call to Florida.

Andrick, the Michigan Pay Telephone Association president, said that in its heyday, pay phone operators typically paid commissions to the owner of a location where one of its pay phones was installed. This arrangement made sense for the pay phone operators because they got a percentage of the revenue from each call.

A 1984 Free Press article described how some high-grossing pay phones in the area netted $500 a month, about $1,150 in today's dollars.

Pay phones were regulated by the Michigan Public Service Commission, which had recently approved an increase from 20 to 25 cents in Michigan Bell's charge for local pay phone calls.

The Detroit area's pay phone business was beginning to decline by the late 1990s, Andrick said.

His company stopped offering its commissions to phone location owners once the phones slipped below revenue thresholds. Eventually, the company started charging for its phones to recoup the maintenance and service costs. The current rate for a pay phone is $60 per month.

"I got to, OK, if you really want this pay phone here, you're going to have to pay me to keep it here," Andrick said.

One carrier, Connecticut-based Frontier Communications, has about 200 pay phones across Michigan that are in convenience stores, hospitals, restaurants, gas stations, campgrounds and one at the Michigan International Speedway, said company representative Andrea Fast.

"Not everyone has a cellphone, so pay phones do come in handy if you need to call 911," she said. "And if you are at a campground and can't charge your cellphone and need to call in an emergency, pay phones would be helpful."

Among the more frequent users of pay phones are prison inmates. There are 2,603 pay phones spread across 32 Michigan state prisons and the Detroit Detention Center, said Chris Gautz, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections. The phones used by inmates are different from regular pay phones and look like stainless steel bricks.

Prisoners make about 1.1 million calls a month and are permitted to talk for no longer than 15 minutes per call. The basic charge on a prison phone is 20 cents per minute for collect calls and pre-paid calls.

Andrick made a visit to a Detroit-area jail earlier this year to empty change boxes and permanently remove a pay phone from a lobby that was no longer getting use.

Fifteen years ago he could have resold that phone. But the secondary market for pay phones is long gone, so he had to junk it.

"Once we take them out, we send them to the scrap heap," said Andrick, whose Pay Telephone Association is considering disbanding.

Business on 08/04/2015

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