My Copies of the APCC Payphone Trade Journal

One of my few claims to legitimacy in the real-world business of public pay telephones was my complimentary subscription to Perspectives, the foursquare-named trade journal of the payphone and public communications industry published by the American Public Communications Council.

You might be surprised to know a payphone trade journal even existed, but in 2007-2009 the industry still had some life left in it, with lots of smiling happy faces at well-attended conventions in places like Miami Beach and Las Vegas.

The industry was well aware of the writing on the wall about its perilous future, and some outfits successfully diversified. Besides regular consumer payphones, for instance, the industry turned its attentions toward prison payphones, a market far more lucrative than regular payphones.

These magazines also discuss what other adaptations payphone owners made to stay afloat as their primary business faded. Some developed digital jukeboxes for restaurants and bars. Many went into the tchotchke and charm machine business, and also laundromats. Others got into air machines at gas stations. Think anything coin fed and you can be sure the payphone industry was attracted to it as a business.

And a lot of those independently owned ATMs you might see around are owned by the exact people who used to own payphones. Some of those ATMs are even on the same exact spot as a payphone used to be. In form, not in function, I think you could make the case that the ATM is what replaced the payphone as street furniture.

So, have fun browsing through this little window into what was left of the payphone industry from 2007-2012. I scanned all the copies from 2007-2009. It was announced that the September 2009 issue of Perspectives would be the last but it looks like they put out at least two digital-only issues after that in 2011 and 2012. I don’t remember where I found those, probably on the now-defunct APCC website.