Paid & Unpaid Pay Phone Ads

Telephone booths still exist – actually this is a telephone semi-booth or single phone telephone kiosk, not quite sure – but one wonders why so many, especially on city streets, remain? Can there be that high a rate of mobile phone failure, mishap or loss, or maybe the number of people who don’t yet have a cellphone is higher than usually believed? Well, the real answer is that they still make useful advertising displays.

Catch Cheating Spouses Spy Equipment sticker. I don’t think that is paid for advertising. This is vandalism as any street art but the deliberate motive here is commerce and there’s no need to exit through the gift shop with this stencil. Are payphones still viable in surveillance and stake outs that the perpetrator thought one of the outdoor telephone kiosks left in Hoboken would be a perfect spot to solicit new customers?

I also wonder about the collect call stickers. I’m surprised you can still make a collect call. Even not cellphones tend to be on some fixed fee plan. Where these stickers  put here with the permission of whomever is in charge of pay phones and if yes, is there a fee involved? If no, how do the stickers wind up there – does somebody with the company drive around look for pay phones to vandalize? How do they know where they are?

In any case, the sticker proves the usefulness of pay phones as advertising mediums. Which is such a benefit for a society where advertising is so rare.