Ahh, an immutable beauty of capitalism: if there is a way to rip unsophisticated customers off, some company is sure to do it:
A widow rented a rotary dial telephone for 42 years, paying what her family calculates as more than $14,000 for a now outdated phone.
Ester Strogen, 82, of Canton, first leased two black rotary phones – the kind whose round dial is moved manually with your finger – in the 1960s. Back then, the technology was new and owning telephones was unaffordable for most people.
Until two months ago, Strogen was still paying AT&T to use the phones – $29.10 a month. Strogen’s granddaughters, Melissa Howell and Barb Gordon, ended the arrangement when they discovered the bills.
. . .
New Jersey-based Lucent Technologies, a spinoff of AT&T that manages the residential leasing service, said customers were given the choice option to opt out of renting in 1985. The number of customers leasing phones dropped from 40 million nationwide to about 750,000 today, he said.
“We will continue to lease sets as long as there is a demand for them,” Skalko said.
Amusing how the writer saw fit to include a definition of a rotary phone–makes me feel a bit older (we had one when I was a kid).
Anyway, 750,000 people still leasing phones? I’d bet over 95% of the “demand” for this “service” comes from people who don’t understand they are being ripped off.