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Wisconsin couple has old phones and nobody to buy them
- bonyt 3y agoTens of thousands. I guess the edited title isn’t wrong, in the same way as “more than 12” is a valid answer to most questions about how many of a given thing are in a city. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1159799-tumblr https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1159799-tumblr
- codetrotter 3y agoTens of thousands is slightly more newsworthy :) (Current HN headline is “Wisconsin couple has tens of old phones – and nobody to buy them”.)
- Izkata 3y agoNow it's "Wisconsin couple has old phones and nobody to buy them" ...which I read as between 2 and 5 (one for each of them or landlines at one-ish for each room of their house).
- chongli 3y agoThousands of tens!
- netmare 3y agoKnown as myriads to many ancient civilizations. Fun fact: in modern Greek a million is called "ekatommyrio", which means 100 (ekató) myriads.
- adrianmonk 3y agoThe original article's title has "of thousands", but somewhere in the chain from there to the HN title, the information got distorted. But, isn't that just how it always works when you play Telephone?
- midasuni 3y agoSo use “thousands” rather than “tens of” I have tens of phones, well certainly more than 10, that suggest a story on e-waste for the average person.
- adrianmonk 3y agoIt was a joke about the game which goes by several different names including "telephone": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
- seba_dos1 3y agoIndeed, I have tens of old phones on my desk right now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bhickey 3y agoTens of thousands. Their catalog looks like a good source for period movie props.
- gwern 3y agoIf I'm reading the middle correctly, that's exactly what happened: they got too used to selling period phones to Hollywood for a high price, and failed to note that while that business was wonderful, this is an intrinsically declining source of demand and that smartphones were busy wiping out their entire future market of 'period movies' (no one needs their prop phones for anything set in the past 20 years, soon, 30 years). They had good cashflow, could blind themselves to the transition because they were so old, leaped at what used to be opportunities but now were being dumped on them as suckers - and that's how they wind up being the last holders of the fast-depreciating hot potatoes.
- NikkiA 3y agoThe other problem with prop phones is that they don't actually need to work.
- yencabulator 3y agoOld phones are heavy, the prop department likely prefers a lightweight modern reproduction.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI saw that title and thought wow, we're really scraping the bottom for content here if TENS of phones makes news.
- qup 3y ago[flagged]
- causality0 3y agoI'm amazed there's not a standard model converter box that plugs into RJ-11 that gives you a bluetooth connection and forwards the dialing numbers to your smartphone.
- joshdont 3y agoI got curious about your comment, turns out there's a similar product on their front page! https://www.phonecoinc.com/topic.asp?map=1&hhrl=home&gorl=group&group=misc&category=Acc&topic=01001 https://www.phonecoinc.com/topic.asp?map=1&hhrl=home&gorl=gr...
- quasse 3y agoWow, what an absolute gem of '90s / '00 web design.
- SteveNuts 3y agoWe should chip in for them to do a css bootcamp.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI think this is the key to their business at this point, advertising "all phones work with Bluetooth" so people can imagine actually being able to use them.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoTwice the Amazon price of Cell2Jack's offering.
- sgerenser 3y agoHugged to death :(
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoHuh! That could actually be a fun project and shouldn't be very difficult with an ESP32. I've done some PSTN design work (although it was 20+ years ago). Maybe I'll put it on the Winter project list :-)
- anymouse123456 3y agoCame for the massive scoop on this couple who own (gasp), "tens of old phones." Pleasantly surprised by the collection of unambiguously, not-cellular, vintage phones, including rotary dialers.
- dang 3y agoTitle edit fail. Fixed now. Sorry!
- anymouse123456 3y agoThanks Dang! You're the bestest
- jamroom 3y agoHonestly based on the photos this looks like they are hoarders.
- toast0 3y agoThey do have at least a webshop; and judging by the look of it, it's pretty old. But maybe poor SEO? I have an affection for old phones, and have window shopped on the interwebs from time to time, but I don't recall seeing this shop before. I picked up my vintage phones at antique shops and thrift stores though, because internet prices are too high. Unfortunately, I can't get my rotary phone to work with my ATAs, even the ones that are supposed to; it works on POTS, but local POTS runs $60/month. I'm just not that committed, also not willing to pay for a pulse to tone converter. My newer old phone has tone dialing, but only on jacks with proper polarity; I might be willing to buy one of the components they made to rectify (hah) the situation, that's missing in my phone even though the model label indicates its there.
- driverdan 3y agoHow so? Other than some of their trailers their inventory seems well organized and relevant to the business. Piles of old cars is not an unusual thing in rural areas, especially for older people. Nothing there appears to be outright trash.
- underseacables 3y agoIt's a shame that things increase in value, and lose value, both monetarily and sentimentally. I had a couple of dozen Monopoly sets from the 1930s that I had obtained in college. They didn't take up that much space, and spent a lot of time sealed in plastic in the attic. Last year I tried to sell them but nobody wanted them, so I just threw them all away. It's sad, because I had a real passion for those, and really enjoyed them, but after 20 years they were just in the way.
- wayfinder 3y agoI just checked eBay and a vintage Monopoly set sells every few days.
- deelowe 3y agoVintage board games are worth good money. The modern ones are made terribly.
- ghaff 3y agoSelling anything on eBay take a moderate bit of effort if (per another thread) you value your time at all. A long while back, I basically decided that if I couldn't get $50-100 for something it basically wasn't worth my time.
- plorkyeran 3y agoYeah, the big awkward thing about selling things on eBay is that even if you value the things you're selling at $0 and so have 100% gross margin it's pretty easy to end up with it being a pretty underwhelming hourly wage. Depending on how much you value your time, giving things away via freecycle or a facebook group etc. can be "cheaper", although that has its own set of problems.
- ghaff 3y agoI live on a fairly busy road in a relatively rural area. My strategy for bulky stuff is to just put a "FREE" sign on it at the end of the driveway and that usually works within a few hours. Electronics I just recycle and I mostly just shrug about other things or donate them.
- monocasa 3y agoAwesome! I've been converting my house's existing phone lines into an intercom system, and have on my list to get a kitsch phone for each room.
- LesZedCB 3y agowoah. that's actually an awesome idea... so do you dial a room?
- system2 3y agoIf they cleaned up and listed individually on eBay, they might actually make some money. There is still a great prop business for movie studios. Creating a niche site and marketing it to collectors with the internet would solve part of their sitting inventory problem. I know they are old people and might not have the energy and knowledge to do it but there could be a potential solution. Maybe their grandchildren could do it...
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoRight. It's not even that they need to create a market. These things are already selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars. I guess it's a fairly common decor element for offices and homes. The same goes for old typewriters. There are obsolete electronics that would be a lot harder to sell, for example CRT TVs - but phones are basically free money.
- neilv 3y agoSeems like it could be stock for a nice little retirement side business (maybe for someone closer to 65 than to 90), hand-refurbishing old phones, and slowly trickling them out for sale on eBay and elsewhere, for premium prices. A complication is that they have so much stock, you'd need to get (road-worthy) transportation to wherever you arranged storage accessible to you. Maybe the collection could be parted out to multiple buyers, to make some of the higher-value lots sell more easily? For example, separate buyers for the lots of wood, candlestick, and novelty phones, then another buyer pays for right to pick over the remainder for 2 weeks, then maybe it's still worthwhile for an area scrap yard to haul away all remaining stock/trailers/fixtures for free?
- RetroTechie 3y agoIf selling individual phones becomes too cumbersome (due to this couple's age, cost of storage space etc), then the obvious fix would be to sell bigger lots. Some people will see a market niche in it (existing or not), and bet some $ on that to start a little side business. Bigger lots + whatever pricing makes it move.
- user3939382 3y agoWe used to have a functioning wooden wall phone in our house. I looked up the price, almost $400. I would buy one for like... $100 as a novelty.
- evbogue 3y agoI was expecting boxes upon boxes of the original Motorola Razr.
- dehrmann 3y agoReminded me of this commercial. It's what they were going for, but the nostalgia hit pretty hard. Whatever Motorola launched in 2016 didn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Smrday4FPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Smrday4FPk
- not_the_fda 3y agoThey have a pricing problem. Not many people are going to buy an old analog phone in 2023 for $200 - $300. And the analog to bluetooth adapter they are selling is $80 and shouldn't cost more than $20. If they dropped the prices to between $50 and $100 they might sell as a novelty.
- euniceee3 3y agoTotally agree. Some of the older stuff used to be worth money, but seems like they were not focused on sales/marketing. Just to haul it all off to the dump would cost a fair amount. I think they need to hire a zoomer on commission to promote the phones on TikTok and shilling them away with the bluetooth adapter being free. Tie this in with a giant telephone art project to draw folks in.
- photonthug 3y ago> Tie this in with a giant telephone art project to draw folks in. Short story contest: All the phones ring at once.. but why, and who is on the other end?? Also, classic telephones are the only way to enter/exit the Matrix, so with the decline of the payphone elsewhere this guy is sitting on a type of mass-transit system.
- dehrmann 3y agoIt seems worse than that: https://archive.is/wlca5/05d66ca7461fc695941b9e7be0214d4ba726816c.jpg https://archive.is/wlca5/05d66ca7461fc695941b9e7be0214d4ba72... At this point, what they have is a liability, not an asset. Edit: if you're getting captcha failures, it's an overhead shot of the 15+ trailers/shipping containers they store phones in.
- ghaff 3y agoYou get the random person who will drop a few bucks on old telephony/computer/electronic gear for the novelty/nostalgia. But it's not really a business at scale; there are only so many geeks looking to pair money burning holes in their pockets with impractical equipment. I know I have some stuff in my garage that someone probably wants and which I'd give them for free even but connecting with someone--especially outside of a city--is hard and I'm not willing to go to much effort.
- steelbird 3y agoThey could lower their prices...
- floren 3y agoYeah I'm sympathetic but this feels like something you see over and over -- rather than adapt to reduced demand / value of your product by lowering prices, just throw your hands in the air and declare that you're stuck with this stuff forever. See the perpetually for sale, perpetually overpriced cars of Craigslist.
- toyg 3y ago"throwing your hands in the air" is a form of advertising. "Oh poor me, will anyone rid me of all this stock? I'm so desperate by now, I'm willing to sell it for the low low price of...". They just had free advertising in a newspaper. That will likely help them move quite a bit of phones.
- euroderf 3y ago> "throwing your hands in the air" is a form of advertising. "Oh poor me, will anyone rid me of all this stock? I'm so desperate by now, I'm willing to sell it for the low low price of..." Crazy Eddie.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoYep. I would consider driving up there to have a look and take a few off their hands... but at those prices, nope. They're going to have to blow these things out well under $100 each.
- dehrmann 3y agoThere's probably more supply than demand. The price will go down to the point of their warehouse costs and opportunity cost of running the business. It's a passion business, so low.
- okasaki 3y agoAnd there was thinking that I was crazy by having a dozen old thinkpads...
- yencabulator 3y agoImagine how weird your stash of old laptops will look like when you're in your 80s. You still have time to get to their level...
- wpm 3y agohttps://archive.is/wlca5 https://archive.is/wlca5 if you get paywalled
- Xiol32 3y ago"We and our 89 partners store and access information on your device for personalised ads and content." Hah, no.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- miked85 3y agoSeems like a very niche market - I think they may have increased their supply a little too much.
- ChumpGPT 3y agoSeveral problems here. They are both hoarders to some extent. They see value in something that is dear to them but junk to most of us. They continued to acquire stock over the years without any plan to get rid of what they had. Children have no interest in getting involved, probably tired of trying to get through to them and not being able to change their behavior, resigned to just waiting for them to pass and throwing it all away. It really is a kind of abuse left to the children to deal with, a financial and logistical nightmare. At this point everything they have should be offered to every museum across the country for free or a tax write off. What is left, sort through and keep 1 of everything worth keeping. The rest should probably get recycled consider there is copper and possibly other metals worth something. There are 1000's of these kinds of scenarios across the country. Old folks who just can't let shit go.
- interestica 3y ago> It really is a kind of abuse left to the children to deal with, a financial and logistical nightmare. Döstädning, Swedish art of "Death Cleaning" https://theconversation.com/swedish-death-cleaning-how-to-declutter-your-home-and-life-90253 https://theconversation.com/swedish-death-cleaning-how-to-de...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wolverine876 3y ago> It’s the same challenges faced by others who deal in antiques like roll-top desks, sets of china, oil lamps, armoires and salt and pepper shakers. What has changed in our society that these things are no longer valued? A simple hypothesis would be that, over time, interest in any particular item waxes and wanes. But to me it feels like fundamental values in society have changed, and the lack of interest in these items is sympomatic. Perhaps as we have shifted radically and quickly to hyper-capitalistism / objectivism as our truth, and in a reactionary surge we seem to ridicule everything else, there is no room now for these things.
- bombcar 3y agoAntiques are only interesting as long as there are people who remember them when they weren’t antique - my father’s father’s generation had roll-top desks as a normalish office accessory, so he’d be interested in them. To me they’re only moderately interesting because he had one. My kids don’t even know what one is. There is some revival in oil and kerosene lamps.
- RetroTechie 3y ago> There is some revival in oil and kerosene lamps. As another poster mentioned: mass production lowering cost, and newer products like LEDs replacing oil lamps. But there's also a kind of fashion aspect. Some gear might be stuff that nobody wants today. And then it features prominently in a box-office movie hit, some people dive into it on 'the socials', and before you know it, the same items fetch crazy prizes on eBay, Etsy & co. But you can't predict this. Storage & maintenance has an ongoing cost. And some goods never have a revival no matter how old or unique. Worthless now, worthless 20, 30, 50y from now. You could almost say (for traders of such inventory) there's a kind of gambling aspect to it.
- dehrmann 3y agoSame for things like baseball cards and celebrity memorabilia. People need to remember the person to care, or it needs to be something "defining" like a Babe Ruth card or something tied to the founding of the US.
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- thelastgallon 3y agoAll they need to do is take pics and sell them as NFTs, and they'll make millions on each phone.
- ttymck 3y agoI have little sympathy for them, if that's what we're supposed to feel. Maybe the article was poorly written but it seems like "they've tried nothing and are all out of ideas". I would appreciate it if stories like this continue to make headlines. Let them be a warning to all our parents. No doubt this will end up being an unpleasant mess for their children to clean up.
- HenryBemis 3y ago> an unpleasant mess for their children to clean up People massively underestimate the amount of pain and discomfort it causes to have to sort out a house filled with useless stuff, ON TOP of the GREAT pain of losing a parent. When my grandma died, 6 adults (her 3 kids and spouses) were cleaning a 50 sqm flat for a week. The amount of worthless paperwork, magazines, newspapers, tchotchkes, bank statements from 40 years ago.. clothes/towels/bed-sheets for 10 people.. unreasonable volume of stuff (she was not a hoarder per se - the flat was spotless and you could easily walk from room to room), just needing enormous cleaning/maintenance and offering zero value. I believe we should all check out lists like "how to prepare for dying" with our elder parents. It's a bit morbid and not a fun discussion for the Sunday dinner, but hey.. business before pleasure..
- genman 3y agoAnd how much did you help her when she was still alive? I think your complaint is unjustified.
- HideousKojima 3y agoHow nuch would the typical old person allow their kids to help out with getting rid of junk while they're still alive?
- genman 3y agoHow many have tried? Gently asking if this or that is needed indeed? Of course arrogantly claiming that they live in the middle of junkyard doesn't get anybody anywhere.
- driverdan 3y agoAs others have pointed out the problem isn't demand, it's pricing. I watch a few auction sites for antique phones. They always sell. The problem is they sell for about half of what Phoneco wants. If they listed their inventory on eBay over a period of a few years with no reserve they could easily sell everything. I'd buy a pay phone from them today if the price was right. It's not.
- dehrmann 3y agoEverything's negotiable.
- BooneJS 3y agoGrowing up, I knew several people who worked HS jobs at Phoneco. Classic.
- autoexec 3y agoHigh prices are part of the problem, but I don't doubt that this stuff could sell at these high prices if they were able to keep them on offer long enough. If old phones aren't cool right now they will be again soon enough. More likely somebody is going to make a killing in the estate sale. The website could use a little work. I actually like the old school design, but higher rez photos, re-organization (there are five different places for novelty phones! https://www.phonecoinc.com/list.asp?map=1 https://www.phonecoinc.com/list.asp?map=1), and removing sold out models (or at least moving them to their own section) would make using it a lot easier.
- jjr8 3y agoWell, Mack the Finger said to Louie the King "I got forty red-white-and-blue shoestrings And a thousand telephones that don't ring Do you know where I can get rid of these things?" And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a minute, son" Then he said, "Yes, I think it can be easily done Just take everything down to Highway 61" Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
- Saris 3y agoWhatever madison.com is, it's in both my Abuse and Malware blocklists.
- pomian 3y agoThat is an amazing collection. Many of them have been refurbished and fixed. I don't think the prices are that high. There are many unique pieces, and compared to the price of other things out there, prices ok. There is some solid stuff, with real build quality. Shipping might be a problem. Definitely gives one ideas for cool projects!
- anotherhue 3y agoNot the first time they've had this sort of coverage: https://www.jsonline.com/picture-gallery/news/columnists/jim-stingl/2019/08/17/stingl-buried-under-zillion-old-telephones-aging-couples-retirement-plans-hold/2033537001/ https://www.jsonline.com/picture-gallery/news/columnists/jim... Note: the domain name seems like a modern day slashdot.
- 5kil5aw 3y agoSex sells. Get some hot looking mouths to call each other on those French handsets, they'll be flying out of there. But yeah, 'BT adapter included".