What the Phone Book Means Today

Movies aside, it is hard to explain to people today just how important the phone book, and particularly the Yellow Pages, was for businesses. Especially local businesses.

The phone book was the ultimate in local advertising. It was Google before Google existed. It was local commerce before algorithms. It was the place you went when the sink leaked, when you needed a lawyer, when your dog needed a vet, or when you wanted to order a pizza. It was the place people new to an area found their first local doctor, dentist, restaurants, tradespeople, and everything else.

I sold Yellow Page ads during the summer of 1993, and let me tell you, it was the easiest sales job ever. Business owners were actually happy to see us, and there was constant clamoring for bigger ads and better placement. Because again, the Yellow Pages were the real deal, and they worked great for businesses. If you were, say, a local plumber with a quarter-page ad, your phone would ring and ring from that ad. For many local businesses, there was no better advertising available.

So when a new phone book landed in my mailbox recently, I’ll admit—I felt a flicker of excitement. I hadn’t seen one of these in years, and I thought, “look who’s still around…the old dog still has a little life left.”

Then my excitement waned a bit. The fact that the book even fit in my mailbox should have given me pause. The Yellow Pages I sold ads for were a good two to three inches thick. This one? Less than a quarter inch. For the entire county. There were a whopping eight pages of phone numbers—in the old days, when everyone had a landline, the A’s alone would have taken eight pages. (Younger readers may be shocked to realize that not only was your name, address, and phone number published in a book, that book was also given away to everyone in your area annually. In today’s privacy-obsessed world, that almost seems weird, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, a few page flips got me to the Yellow Pages, and I was really curious to see what local businesses still had ads there.