4 ms·

Seems weird, to me, that you would need a card. Every phone booth I've used took dimes, then quarters. Some, near the end, could take a credit card or a telco

• pvitz 4y ago
  In Austria at least, this was quite common. I remember that the phone booth in our school only accepted a phone card and almost every pupil had one for emergency cases. You could buy them easily in magazine shops.
• andylynch 4y ago
  Not sure where GP was, but in NZ which I think was fairly typical, pay phone cards were introduced in 1989 - you could buy them at nearly any corner shop. I think the big advantages were coin collectors no longer being necessary (they were a huge overhead!), and vandalism to steal the coins being no more.
• franga2000 4y ago
  For at least the last 25 years of operation, all of our phone booths only took smartcards that you could buy in basically any store or news stand.
  • b112 4y ago
    Interesting. Seems the same elsewhere, too, as per other replies. I recall our phones, as I said, having a card slot and coin slot at the end. I wonder if they retrofitted, with the goal of getting people used to cards, before removing the change slot entirely. This logic seems typical here. But then the smartphone explosion happened, so just decided to never buy new payphones with slots only. EG, rather than phase out for card only, they'd have years of spare parts and phones, as they slowly removed booths.
• squarefoot 4y ago
  At least over here in the EU coins were later substituted by magnetic phone cards; iirc in the late 80s, presumably as a measure against vandalism and theft. When phone booths were later decommissioned, all those cards became collectibles and still have a market online.