Yellow Pages offer walk through time

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 22, 2005 | by David Koenig Associated Press

DALLAS -- Debbie Bowie makes a living by helping others organize their desks and closets, and when she heard about feng shui, it seemed natural to incorporate the Chinese art of arranging objects into her business.

Bowie was, after all, the only feng shui organizing consultant in Richmond, Va., and she wanted potential customers to know.

"I was listed in the Yellow Pages under 'organizing services,' but there were no listings for 'feng shui,' " Bowie said.

A sales representative for the phone company tried to talk her into a second listing under "interior design," but that didn't seem to describe her business. So Bowie persisted, and her request for a brand new heading in the phone book was granted.

New versions of the Yellow Pages now landing on doorsteps across the country include such new headings as "Botox," "body piercing," "paintball," "satellite equipment" and "teeth whitening." Gone in most cases are "discos," and others barely hang on -- "Toupees, See Wigs & Hairpieces."

The first phone directory appeared in 1878 in New Haven, Conn., two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Yellow paper to indicate business listings appeared five years later. According to phone-industry lore, a printer making a directory ran out of white paper and used yellow instead. The color stuck.

As party lines gave way to cellular phones and Internet calls, Yellow Pages listings also changed, reflecting the way we live and work.

"Society tells us what the book should look like," said Jim Palma, marketing director for the directory-publishing business of Verizon Communications Inc., which is based near Dallas. "It's a living record of what's going on in society."

The 1952 phone book for Dumas, a small town in the Texas Panhandle, included listings for adding machines and phonographic records. As recently as 1976, the book for the Dallas suburb of Plano had nothing under "computers" but plenty for "citizen's band radios."

Most new entries are the result of requests by advertisers such as Jerry Stoyer, president of Enviro Medics. The company had been around for several years by 1997, when medical officials in Cleveland said that the deaths of several infants were probably due to lung disease triggered by mold.

"It caused an excitement over this mold. It became a retail issue," Stoyer said. His company, based in the Dallas suburb of Garland, had been listed in the Yellow Pages under "carpet cleaning and water removal," and added "air-duct cleaning" when that became popular. In 2001, it took out the first large ad in Verizon's Dallas phone book under the new heading of "mold remediation."

Instead of depending on customer leads from health departments and insurance companies, customers started calling Stoyer directly. The mold remediation listing worked well for a while, but insurance companies began resisting payment of mold claims in Texas. Most of Stoyer's business now comes from testing for mold inside homes offered for sale.

As more categories were added over the years, the Yellow Pages directories grew in size and as a business.

One of the earliest companies in the phone book publishing business, R.H. Donnelley Corp., recently bought a portion of the directory-publishing business of San Antonio-based SBC Communications Inc. Donnelley paid $1.42 billion in cash for SBC's interest in a yellow-pages publishing business in Illinois and northwest Indiana.

Verizon's information services unit, which includes online directories but is primarily old-fashioned Yellow Pages, has annual sales of more than $4 billion. It faces five large rivals, including Donnelley, and scores of smaller players, most of whom are publishers and not phone companies.

Many Web sites also offer directories of personal and business listings. Search engines run by Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. grow ever more powerful, and www.Amazon.com Inc. offers online Yellow Pages.

Then there are cell phones. Some services, including ones offered by the phone companies, will point a cell-phone user in the middle of Manhattan to the nearest florist or pharmacy.

Phone companies say their books will survive the Internet because they're handier than a computer when sitting at the kitchen table. Online advertising is growing more rapidly, up to 20 percent a year compared to the low single digits for U.S. Yellow Pages, but the phone books bring in twice the revenue, according to research firms.

New Yellow Pages listings

Botox

Paintball

Body piercing

Satellite equipment

Teeth whitening