old-timey

New Yorkers Have Forgotten How to Use Payphones

Photo via Shooting Brooklyn, on Flickr

Some never even knew, and they’re frustratedly jamming quarters into the unfamiliar boxes to try to make them work now that blackouts and downed cellular sites have made smartphones untenable. “I lost a lot of coins,” one woman told the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen. Finally, a break for the franchisees who own the city’s remaining call boxes: “Phones that normally do two dollars a day are taking in $50 a day.”

New Yorkers Have Forgotten How to Use Payphones