Like clockwork, today we received the new edition of the Yellow Pages telephone directory. You know, that big thick heavy clunky telephone directory…
The Yellow Pages is practically a national institution in many western nations and it’s distinctive colour and size, along with it’s logo are recognised everywhere. In fact you could almost say you’d ‘feel lost’ without it… but that would only be half the truth!
Yes, it’s a telephone directory and we use it to look up the telephone numbers of local businesses but it also has other vital uses.
It’s the block of choice when you need to raise the monitor on your desk, being just the ‘right’ thickness. With it’s superior weight, it makes an ideal bookend to all those lever arch files. As an anger management tool, ripping up the pages does not leave you with any lasting consequences and it along with others, makes for a remarkably comfortable and fully adjustable seat down in the stock room.
But all this is ending!
Everything we love about the Yellow Pages directory is based on or is due to it’s amazing thickness and/or heavy weight – so you can imagine my shock and horror when I received this thin sliver of a directory today… totally useless to me now!
What happened to it, where’s my fat friend gone?
The internet ‘happened’, that’s what! The old argument of Print versus Online has reared it’s ugly head once again and claimed another victim – this time it’s the Yellow Pages. Don’t get me wrong, the Yellow Pages is not dead, it’s just mortally wounded and will now surely die a slow and embarrassing death over the next few editions.
The combination of a few less advertisers and a management decision to reduce the print size to infinitesimally small… has kept printing costs down but at the same time hugely reduced the size of the edition.
Ironically, the publishers actions will have inadvertently hastened their eventual demise. Making the print so very small will alienate the very demographic that still relies heavily on the directory – the aged or non technophile generation.
C’est la vie.
Tags: yellow pages