Is this the party to whom I am speaking?

Remembering the days of long distance past

I was looking at the back of a Listerine bottle this morning and I noticed two telephone numbers for customer service:

The first number is an 888 number, indicated as “toll-free,” and the second is a traditional telephone number in the 215 area code, which users are invited to call collect.

It occurred to me that many younger users of the product may not have any idea what a “toll-free” number is, or a collect call.

Today, of course, many people make the majority of their telephone calls on a mobile device, and most mobile providers that I’m aware of don’t differentiate between calls to your next door neighbor and calls to anywhere else in the U.S. In effect, any call to someone within the U.S.A. is a “local” call, in the sense that you aren’t being charged anything extra for it based on distance.

Some people still have landline phones, of course, and they’re also used by businesses — but if those landline phones are connected to a cable system or some other voice-over-IP provider, most of them, too, offer undifferentiated calling anywhere in the U.S.A. as part of basic service.

I am sure there are still people who have traditional landline service, through a legacy telephone…