1-800-PODCAST

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0:43Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help get your job, the premium status it deserves, at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm here with reporter Daniel Ackerman. Hey, Dan. Hi, Roman. So you reached out to us because you wanted to tell us about a very specific tool that you say completely revolutionized American consumer culture and created the blueprint for the modern retail economy. It's like big words, if true. Yeah.

1:23So when you think about how many of us shop today, it's something that you can do whenever and wherever you want. Like you could be in bed at 3 a.m., hit a couple buttons on your phone, and the next morning there's a vacuum cleaner sitting on your doorstep. And that shopping impulse is not bound by time or distance, right? Right. Well, you can trace this 24-7 shopping mentality back to the 1960s when AT &T introduced a revolutionary technology for commerce. And this is something that almost everyone listening has used at some point in their lives. And if you haven't figured it out yet, Roman, I'm talking about the Inward Wide Area Telephone Service, or INWATS for short.

2:05That wasn't what I had in mind, but okay, keep going. All right, all right. So just in case anyone listening isn't a complete telephony nerd, this technology is more commonly known as the 800 number. 800-588 1-800-574-8366. Call 1-800-STAR-TREK. Call 1-800-GENERAL NOW! Oh, yes, of course. I've used many 800 numbers in my lifetime, but I don't know if I ever really considered it a technology, but of course it is. It's a really shockingly understudied part of the American economy, of American culture, of American society. Compared to something like advertising in general or television, the bookshelf on the history of telephony is pretty small.

2:48That is Rick Popp. He's a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. And he says that the 800 number was originally introduced by AT &T not necessarily for shopping purposes, but because they were trying to solve another problem for businesses, which was that long-distance calling was really expensive for their customers. Ordinary telephone users almost never made long-distance calls. I mean, they were so expensive. So if you were an average person, you might place a long distance call every now and then to, you know, wish your grandma in St. Louis happy birthday. But long distance calling was basically a luxury at this time.

3:27Average consumers definitely did not want to have to pay a long distance charge for something mundane like calling up a business to order a pair of jeans. If it was time sensitive enough, then maybe you'd call and you'd eat the costs of the long distance call. But for the most part, it was written communication. Now, if you're a large company or retailer fielding calls from consumers all over the country, it would make sense to take on those long distance charges for your customers. There was at least one way that customers could reach businesses toll free, and that was by Collect Calling. Roman, you remember Collect Calling?

4:05Yes, I made a lot of collect calls. I had a lot of relatives in faraway places. In the early days, at least, you would actually dial zero, reach an operator, give them your name, and then they would make the call and ask if they would accept the charges on the other end. And if they said yes, you got connected. And if they said no, you just got disconnected. But in the beginning, you actually had to talk to an operator. Exactly. And for the younger crowd, I couldn't find an actual news clip showing how collect calling works. But here's a clip from Dr. Strangelove, which I think does the trick.

4:36No, I'm perfectly serious, operator. The president, yes, the president of the United States. Oh, I'm sorry, I haven't got enough change. Could you make this a collect call, operator? Just one second, operator. They won't accept the call. Have you got 55 cents? Yeah, that's pretty much how it worked. Right, and as that clip shows, in the 1960s, toll-free calling was a really inefficient process, right? Because you had to dial an operator and then the charges needed to be accepted by the company. Or in the case of Dr. Strangelove, the president would have had to accept the charges. Exactly. And so AT &T, which was, you know, the largest phone company in the world at the time, they wanted to make this easier.

5:18They wanted to streamline this whole process. And that's one reason why they introduced InWATS, a.k.a. the 800 number, to automate that toll reversal. So, you know, no longer would a company have to go through this operator middleman. A business could just purchase an 800 number, which would automatically signal to AT &T, hey, don't charge our customers who are making the call, charge us, the business that's receiving the call instead. So this was first introduced in the 1960s, you said? And what did the early days of the 800 number look like? Well, it was pretty experimental. You know, companies were still just trying to figure out how to use this technology profitably.

5:57And the initial results were kind of mixed. Rick Popp told me about one of the earliest companies to get an 800 number. It was this pretty established catalog retailer called Aldens. Now, they were a competitor of Sears. So they sold run-of-the-mill catalog stuff like toys, clothes, kitchen appliances. But what Aldens tried to do was to take on this new 800 number technology and promote it as something like futuristic, where they could take customer orders at light speed. They came up with this idea, you know, shortly after NWATS, the 800 number is introduced, to run this really splashy 16-page advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post to basically promote the hell out of this 800 number that they had set up, which they called Jet Phone Service.

6:44Jet Phone Service. It's sleek. It's high-tech. A reminder that passenger jet travel was pretty new and glamorous at the time. And Alden's wanted to make the feeling of dialing an 800 number feel just like stepping on to a sleek new jet plane. So they set up 20 different 800 lines all ready to receive the onslaught of incoming orders through this new 800 system. But Rick Pop says they never actually came. Only about 5 % of customer orders after that ad campaign came by phone. The rest were just done the old way. Someone filled out a paper form, wrote a check, put it in an envelope, stamped it, mailed it in.

7:23The same slow process that they've been doing since the dawn of mail order retail. Yeah, the same slow, sort of high friction shopping that had always happened. Yeah, the cultural habit of kind of instant shopping, instant gratification. It just wasn't there. And as one ad industry writer put it at the time, the public is, quote, not used to the convenience as yet, end quote. But that would change as we get into the 1970s, thanks in part to another technology that was gaining popularity at the time, the credit card. With only one credit card, the Bank of America card, you can charge almost anything, almost anywhere.

8:01The Bank of America card gives you instant credit from Boston to Honolulu, from London to Bangkok. The Bank of America card will soon be coming to Southern Ohio as another service. The credit card is kind of a requirement for this all to work seamlessly. right like now you mention it like calling a 1-800 number only sort of reduces friction you know in one small part of the chain like the credit card really makes the long distance ordering more possible right i mean there were other ways to pay over the phone before credit cards like you could have a store charge account yeah or you could use something called cash on delivery where you basically pay the delivery person when the item arrives but credit cards made this whole process just way more convenient.

8:47And they really unlocked the 800 numbers potential for shopping. You always want to look your best, but the last thing you have time to do is shop. That's why there's the Spiegel catalog. It's filled with all the looks you love. So this is a TV ad for Spiegel that was also a former mail order retailer that had previously sold things like furniture, and they eventually pivoted to women's workwear. Huh, that is quite a rebrand. Yeah, but Spiegel was able to transform during the 800 number era to extend past business hours into a 24-7 retail model. You know, it wanted to serve busy working parents who put the kids to bed at night and then had to cram in their shopping before they went to sleep.

9:33And this was a really lucrative model for Spiegel. You could make a telephone call at, say, 9, 10 o 'clock at night, right? You could act on the impulse of wanting to buy something in these parts of the day when, you know, it just wouldn't have been conceivable to purchase something. Right. You know, marketers want folks to to, you know, act on their impulse, you know, when the impulse is strong and the 800 number makes that more possible. Right. So American consumers are now finally able to give into that instant gratification of shopping at any time of the day. Yes, they are not time limited in making potentially financially ruinous decisions.

10:11And another thing that happened that really made 800 numbers take off in the 1980s was the breakup of AT &T. As of today, the nationwide Bell telephone system dissolves into seven regional companies. The breakup of AT &T has left many people confused and prompted one musical group to record a satirical song. They say that breaking up is hard to do If you wanted a toll-free number, it was probably being issued by AT &T. Now, the company was a monopoly, and so those numbers were pretty expensive to get. But after an antitrust lawsuit in the early 80s, AT &T was forced to break into several other companies to encourage competition.

10:55And after that happened, prices for 800 numbers started to fall, and suddenly small businesses that could not afford a toll-free line before, well, now they could. Because I'm your lady. Imagine owning the world's greatest love songs. Call 1-800-818-6806 to order the Ultimate Love Songs Collection. To order your Betty Crocker Bacon Fill, call 1-800-765. To order 12 fascinating issues from Zoo Books for$19.95, call 1-800-441-2400. Bacon Fill. I don't really know what a Betty Crocker Bacon Fill is, but people started to buy them with 1-800 numbers. They started to buy zoo books and pretty much anything else you can think of.

11:36Right. So once the 800 number becomes more widespread, how much commerce was actually done over these toll-free lines? Quite a bit. By the mid-1990s, more than$130 billion worth of goods and services were sold via 800 numbers. And that amount was nearly 2 % of the entire country's GDP. Holy crap. Like 2%, that's as much like as military spending. Yeah, that's a lot of impulse shopping. And pretty soon, companies realized that 800 numbers were not just good for selling stuff, they were also a really good way to publicize a business itself. There was this rush to buy the best vanity numbers for marketing purposes.

12:16And this is the point where we get to those 1-800 numbers that a lot of us know by heart today. So we're talking about phone numbers like 1-800-LAWYERS. Call 1-800-LAWYERS right now. The call is free. The advice is free. And we stay open 24 hours, seven days a week. We're open New Year's Eve at midnight. So call 1-800-LAYERS. We're there right now. Love to celebrate New Year's Eve with a call to 1-800-LAYERS. And then there was, of course, also 1-800-Flowers. When you want to send your best wishes with flowers, call us and we'll make all the arrangements. 800-Flowers. Just call our name. Before that company was called 1-800-Flowers, it started as just a single brick-and-mortar florist in New York.

13:02But that 800 number gave it the platform to reach millions of new customers all over the country basically any time of the day. I feel like originally I thought of the 800 prefix as a kind of area code, but it's actually kind of the opposite of an area code, right? Because an area code signifies a specific place and a specific time zone. But when you're calling an 800 number, you have no idea where the person picking up the phone is located or what time it is for them. You just know that they are available to help you and that it's free. Yeah, that's true. The 800 prefix does kind of feel like it's removed from time and space.

13:38But the funny thing is that if you were calling an 800 number during the peak of the toll-free boom, there's actually a pretty good chance that the person picking up the phone was based in one specific place. And that was Omaha, Nebraska. Okay, say more. Okay, I'll explain. So the 800 number had a huge impact on companies' physical footprints because toll-free calling made it possible to centralize customer service into like one giant call center in one place rather than staffing all these local branch offices in every city across America. And Omaha actually became the place where many of these call centers ended up.

14:20So why was Omaha chosen for this great honor? So Omaha actually had a lot of phone capacity. It had about twice the capacity for incoming calls that you'd expect for a city of its size. And that's because after World War II, the Air Force chose Omaha as the hub for its strategic air command. What that means is they basically said, OK, Omaha is going to be the place that will survive a Cold War nuclear apocalypse. and they laid a lot of phone lines coming into Omaha over the course of the 1940s and 50s. So Omaha was like primed and ready for the 1-800 era. Ready to answer the call. And corporate executives also kind of had this belief that people from Omaha had like a mythical, neutral American accent.

15:07So when call center workers in Omaha picked up the phone, they would feel familiar to most Americans. Obviously a lot to unpack there, which we're not going to get. Yeah, for real. But, you know, we can keep going. But Omaha does quickly become this epicenter of the new toll-free economy. And by the second half of the 1980s, if you dialed an 800 number, there's a pretty good chance you'd hear something like this. 1-800-LIVE-AID. This is Jody. May I help you? So this is Jody Lovallo. She's an amateur historian from Omaha. And she worked in one of these call centers back in their heyday of the mid-1980s.

15:45And she says they pretty much transformed the economy of Omaha. There was just big call centers all across the city, and they were all hiring. It was pretty easy to get hired. There was, you know, more jobs than there were people. So overall, more than 10 ,000 Omahans started working in call centers, basically serving as the back end of American capitalism. And Jodi told me it was a pretty good job for someone in her stage of life. My favorite shift was like four to midnight. I like to have my days free for personal endeavors. It was air conditioned. We all had the little headsets. And I remember sitting together with just people I had gone to high school with that I had like recruited.

16:24So Jodi was working in a big room with dozens of cubicles populated in part by her high school friends. And her call center answered calls on behalf of like a whole bunch of different companies and organizations. So whenever a call came in, a script would pop up on her computer screen to, you know, sell craftmatic adjustable beds or fake diamond rings for$5. And Jodi said there was a real discernible kind of rhythm to how these calls came in. We would be sitting there not having any calls and all of a sudden they would all light up and it would be everybody from like Alabama in a certain zip code and something had flashed, you know, on the TV, like, call if you get your diamond L ring.

17:06And then everybody like in that zip code would call at the same time. And then we would all get busy like at the same time because we like, oh, the commercial just went on. And there were times when the calls became overwhelming. A good example of this actually came before Jody's time back in August of 1977, just after the death of Elvis Presley. Companies started flooding the TV with commercials selling Elvis merchandise and greatest hits albums. 20 giant hits, two big albums, plus the exclusive bonus picture book, yours for just$7.98. To order this final tribute to Elvis, call toll-free 1-800-228-2290.

17:42And so many people called the 800 number to get their piece of Elvis history. It actually crashed the system, and the regional phone lines around Omaha went down. It's the power of the king and the 1-800 number combined. This is unbeatable. Yeah, but she said that her favorite calls to take were for Live Aid. I don't want to date you, Roman, but you must remember Live Aid, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. It was a big deal. Yeah, so just for anyone Gen Z or younger, Live Aid was this huge televised concert, and it happened in July of 1985. The concert was a fundraiser to support famine relief in Ethiopia.

18:19And the lineup was just unreal. There was Queen, U2, David Bowie, Run DMC, Paul McCartney, Tina Turner, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, just like so many incredible artists. And looking back, like this may have been the high watermark for 800 numbers because the way that Live Aid raised money was by having viewers call the 800 numbers on their screens during the concert. To make your pledge, dial 800 Live Aid. We've got thousands of operators ready to take your call. If the lines are busy, please keep trying. The number is 800-L-I-V-E-A-I-D. We guarantee every dollar given by the public will go to Africa.

18:57Call now. And many of those callers were speaking directly to call center workers in Omaha, like Jodi. Sometimes they'd call and they'd go, can we speak to Cindy Lauper? Is Cindy Lauper there? Because they thought we were there, you know, at the stage. They have the impression that you are very connected to the event. You're very there. But we were not. We were, you know, in a call center, answering phones in Omaha. And you can look at how much money was raised for those events. And good lion's share of it came through our hands. A quick note, Cyndi Lauper did not actually perform at LiveAid. That's an important fact check.

19:32She had to drop out because of a health issue. But the event was pretty successful. It ended up raising well over$100 million. And Omaha call centers made it happen. You know, these call centers were the engine rooms that made the entire 1-800 business model run. And in many ways, they created the blueprint for the modern 24-7 retail economy that we live in today. I mean, it created the blueprint, but it's been a while since I actually called a 1-800 number. Yeah, that's probably an observation a lot of people have had. The demand for 800 numbers did go downhill in the 1990s and early 2000s. And one reason for that is because of cell phones.

20:12You know, the original intent for in watts was to make long distance calling more affordable for customers. But, you know, today your cell phone plan probably has some kind of flat rate or unlimited nationwide calling. And so now there's basically no financial incentive for a company to get a 1-800 prefix for their customers to call. Right. Because today it's the same price for me to call someone in Oakland as to dial you in Boston. Like it's just it's minutes. That's just how plans work. Right. And also, like with so many other industries, consolidation and outsourcing sent a whole bunch of these call center jobs overseas.

20:49Yeah. And then, of course, there's the Internet because then Amazon comes on board. Right. The internet made the 800 number pretty much obsolete as a shopping platform. And then the task of reaching a business directly, that got shifted to digital channels too, like live chat, email, apps, and web forms. Yeah. I also feel like calling, like making a voice call to customer service is just not something, you know, my kids do very often. It fills them with great anxiety to actually talk to someone on the phone and they try to avoid it at all costs. Like yesterday, the oldest kid in the house was talking on the phone and it blew my mind.

21:26Like I've only seen them use their phones for TikTok and playing video games, really. Yeah, I should say, though, that there are still some call centers in Omaha. Like if you called 1-800-THE-OMNI to make a reservation at an Omni hotel, you might talk to someone there in Omaha. So if you're like itching to hear the neutral, quote unquote, neutral American accent, you can dial the Omni hotel. Yeah, and it won't cost you a dime. So, you know, these 800 numbers, they're less popular maybe than they used to be, but many businesses still have them. They're still around. And that's because there are a lot of folks out there who rely on them.

22:04Not everybody has high-speed internet. Not everybody has unlimited data on their phones. Or a lot of people don't have the tech literacy to navigate a chatbot. So for seniors, rural communities, people with low incomes, The 1-800 number is a way to offer free democratic lifelines to the companies that they need to be able to contact. That 1-800 number remains the friction-free portal to get a live person online for free without having to pay a dime. This is Stephen Minnig. Stephen worked in the telecom industry for years, and now he teaches at Georgetown. And he said on top of that accessibility factor, another reason we do still use 1-800 numbers is that they're just more legitimate.

22:48Well, I think, you know, it's easy to think of them as being relics of maybe the 1980s, the 1990s. But really, 1-800 numbers have evolved from just a way to kind of reach out to a company into a tool that really talks about trust and accessibility. So that first piece, trust. There's research showing that people just inherently prefer calling an 800 number compared to a specific area code. When you think about a consumer sees a toll-free number, it signals to them that the business is established. We have a lot of spam calls spoofing local area codes now, and so a recognized toll-free number gives people sort of a shield of legitimacy.

23:31To be clear, there are scammers who use 800 numbers, but they are much less common and it's just harder to get away with since businesses need to register those numbers with the phone company. The irony here is that companies still use these 800 numbers to signal trust and accessibility and the ability to talk to a human. But these days, you're increasingly likely to dial an 800 number and reach a chatbot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is the that is a problem. But I'm always happy when I see an 800 number, Like if I have a problem on a website and there is no number to reach, I get extremely frustrated and mad.

24:08So that makes me happy that they're still hanging on. Well, it was nice to speak to you, a real-life human and not a chatbot. Thanks for bringing us the story, Dan. Thanks for having me. I think you should actually set up a 1-800 line for the show, like 1-800-99-PI-POD or something. And then, you know, everyone can call in with some great story ideas for you. I think we might get quite a few good story ideas from people calling in, but we would also get like a lot of cranks who would just be just like, why don't you do more stories about fonts? Right. And then you'd be footing the bill for all that.

24:40Exactly. That would be just pain for my own misery. Dan, this is really fun. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.

24:55when we come back from the break we revisit a story about the toll-free numbers ultimate form stay with us instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default built-in content settings for the content teens can see contact limits for who can contact them and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com slash teenaccounts.

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