South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Landline phones offering a new lifeline
First came the rhinestone-encrusted rotary. Then the cherry-red lips. After that, the cheeseburger.
By last summer, Chanell Karr had amassed a collection of six landline phones. Her most recent, an orange corded model made as a promotional item for the 1986 film “Pretty in Pink,” was purchased in June. Though she only has one of them — a more subdued VTech phone — hooked up, all are in working order.
“During the pandemic I wanted to disconnect from all of the things that distract you on a smartphone,” said Karr, 30, who works in marketing and ticketing at a music venue near her home in Alexandria, Kentucky. “I just wanted to get back to the original analog ways of having a landline.”
In 2003, more than 90% of respondents to a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they had an operational landline in their homes. As of June 2021, that number — which includes internet-connected phones and those wired the old-fashioned way (via copper lines running from a home to a local junction box) — had dropped to just over 30%.
But like record players and VHS tapes, landline phones are being embraced by nostalgic fans who say their nonscrollable and nonstrollable nature is an antidote to screen fatigue and overmultitasking. The crescent shape of many phones’ receivers, users say, is also a more natural, comfortable fit against a cheek than the planar body of a smartphone. And with a noncordless device, one must commit more to the act of conversation; the phone call becomes more intentional.
In January, Emily Kennedy, a communications manager in the Canadian public service, started using an old Calamine-lotion-pink rotary phone from her father’s office as a way to detach from her work in social media.
Ironically, it was on Twitter where Kennedy got the idea. When Rachel Syme, a staff writer at The New Yorker, tweeted in January about a landline phone that she had hooked up via Bluetooth, Kennedy was one of many who replied saying that Syme had inspired them to set up one of their own.
Like Syme and many other modern users of analog phones, Kennedy doesn’t have her landline copper-wired — so it doesn’t have its own number — but uses a Bluetooth attachment to connect it to her smartphone’s cellular service.
Matt Jennings has worked at Old Phone Works, a company in Kingston, Ontario, that refurbishes and sells landline phones, since 2011. Now its general manager, Jennings, 35, said that in the past two years, customers’ demand for candy-colored rotary phones from the 1950s and 1960s has skyrocketed.
Of what has motivated the recent desire for landline phones, Jennings said, “It’s a return to basics.” He added, “You can’t really go anywhere with a corded phone, you’re basically stuck within a 3-foot radius of the base. You can have a real conversation without being distracted.”
Rachel Lahbabi, 37, noticed a similar surge in interest after she started selling landline phones online through her Etsy store, Robert Joyce Vintage, in early 2021. By that October, they had become some of the most viewed
products she offered, said Lahbabi, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“The ones I was putting up were just going so quickly,” she said. “I thought, ‘OK, people are clearly looking for this, so I should really focus on this trend.’ ”
Across Etsy, there was a
45% increase in searches for Y2K and ’90s phones and a 26% increase in searches for rotary phones in 2021 compared with
2020, said Dayna Isom Johnson, a trend expert at the company.
As appealing as landline phones may be, even their most ardent fans recognize it is basically impossible to use them exclusively.
Alex McConnell, 30, a personal banker at KeyBank in Fort Collins, Colorado, has a Western Electric rotary phone wired to copper lines at his home.
His landline phone is not only more reliable than a cellphone, he said, but also encourages him to memorize friends’ phone numbers, which he considers a form of intimacy.
“Since I actually have to dial my friend’s phone numbers, I find it really does help me connect them to memory,” McConnell said.
But even he cannot avoid the call of modern life.
“My secret sorrow is that I do have a cellphone.”