Ed Kohler really, really doesn’t like the Yellow Pages. Years ago I used to sell Yellow Pages for Hanson Directories in Iowa. I’m not exactly a great sales guy. Good at matching up customers to what will work for them, but I don’t oversell well and I’m not a closer, that being — to me — too manipulative. (Yes, they fired me. Even in 1984, a YP salesperson making $800 a week [$1,577/wk in 2007 $$] was considered to be a poor performer.)

In their day the Yellow Pages were the beast of marketing and only a very foolish business person would try to get away without a listing. How much to spend was always a good question, the YP folks being brilliant at squeezing every possible dollar out of advertisers. In the ’90s when I was building my resume business, the Strib and DEX competed to see who could screw the most bucks out of their customers. I think they both made more money from my business than I did.

That was then, this is now:

Those books were delivered to my apartment building two weeks ago today. Last night I noticed that not one of the five plastic-wrapped bundles of phone books had been opened. Not one tenant in my building wanted one. Not one visitor to our building wanted one. It was on the porch outside the security door so that means that every person walking by, every homeless person in the neighborhood (and there are more than a few) also passed on a chance to own their very own FREE! white and yellow pages for St. Paul.

Early this morning the landlord got fed up and put them in the dumpster. I need to thank him for that. Last year they sat there for a month before he threw them out, but then again I think someone did take one book last year.

It’s time for the legislature (not our city councils) to pass a bill making it illegal to distribute phone books to anyone who has not opted to receive one.

The phone companies had a great monopoly going. Too bad they had to ruin it. DEX could have thrived online but instead squandered a golden opportunity by being stupid. They made online Yellow Pages be all about pushing heavy advertisers when consumers just wanted a list of ALL the pizza places within a couple miles of home or the office. DEX refused to be transparent and tried to leverage their former monopoly into a new neighborhood.

Google Maps will do what you ask them to, and Google Maps is now eating DEX’s lunch. Oops, that was a link to the clued in folks who snapped up dex.com back when you could get three-letter domains. The phone book folks weren’t that savvy and had to settle for DEXknows.com, which was a lousy place to find a pizza until . . . [insert drumroll] … they teamed up with GoogleMaps!

DEX never figured out the internet and now they’re partnering with GoogleMaps to do together what only DEX could have done back in the ’90s. Had, that is, anyone at DEX actually heard of the internet back in the ’90s.

If you have a business, save yourself some money and kill your YP ads next year. Assuming, that is, that DEX is still around by then. But again just in case they are, the Lege needs to tell them what they can do with their unsolicited phone books.

[If DEX was smart, and I think we've established that they're not, they'd stop giving away phone books and would instead start selling them. Make the oldsters who aren't online pay for the publishing costs, and make money by putting ads back into the main book.]

 

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Hmm, gotta bunch of links but the YP rant ran a little long.

Expect another post later but for now, enjoy a rare mono-topic post from Minnesota’s wordiest blogger.