A caption for one of many interesting and poignant photographs at "Wisconsin couple has tens of thousands of old phones — and nobody to buy them" (Wisconsin State Journal).
Time, technology and changing tastes have derailed a once profitable, unique business that at its peak sold thousands of vintage telephones to buyers from around the world and produced revenues of nearly $1 million a year. The Knappens, Ron, 87, and Mary, 82, possess a collection that over the past 52 years has clearly gotten out of hand.... The granary constructed in 1903 is full of phones, same with the barn and its silo built in 1957.... The pole shed from Menards put up in 1979 is filled with telephones along with 33 semi-trailers, some missing their doors and surrounded by junked cars, trucks and campers. One, according to Knappen, holds 1,000 walnut boxes for vintage wall phones. Another is used to store 1,000 steel desk phones.... A mile away, on a separate property, the Knappens have filled a former chicken barn with telephones and they have an 80-foot-long, 60-foot-wide steel shed, half of which is filled with phones, the other half with 12 cars and trucks. The Knappens are also in the process of trying to empty a 41,000-square-foot building in downtown Galesville....
It sounds like a shocking case of hoarding, but this was a business, and we're told it "produced revenues of nearly $1 million a year." And yet revenue is one thing and profit another. Was this business ever profitable? Why continue build inventory so out of proportion to sales?
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37 comments:
Sooner or later a remake of "The Pesident's Analyst" will get made, and those phones will be needed for a flashback scene. Patience!
If those were 1950s - 1960s cars then they'd be rich, rich, rich. If those were horse buggies they'd not have much value. If they were Ford Model T cars they'd be worth less than you'd think. Just pay attention.
I used to sell used audio CDs for 50% of the new price, and buy used ones for 60% of new. Used CD stores went out of business as soon as streaming audio went mainstream circa 2015. Just pay attention.
But, older people tend to cling to their youth. Some of them even stay in congress, the senate, and I dare say the presidency far past their sell-by date.
He needs a little imagination. Given the market for retro and antiques, if he paired up with someone who can convert them to cellular, they’d sell like hotcakes.
Enigma said...I used to sell used audio CDs for 50% of the new price, and buy used ones for 60% of new.
Say what, now?
$1 plus shipping on Ebay, Etsy, Craigslist etc. Start with the building you have to move out of. Moving them again is just more sunk cost. The $1 won't cover the handling but moving is handling and they are already doing that for free.
“There are few orders and the couple’s three children have no interest in the business.”
And each is in line to inherit 11 semi-trailers full of old phones.
Enigma "used to sell used audio CDs for 50% of the new price, and buy used ones for 60% of new."
Interesting business model there! Lose a bit on each sale, but make up for it in volume?
Also set a few at a time at the end of the driveway with a sign that says "free". You will be amazed at what you can get rid of that way. You may be a hoarder but you are not the only one.
I suspect that someone, at some point, will have to pay someone else to haul this stuff away.
But then other questions arise - Will they accept this at a local landfill? At what cost? Are any of these phones regarded as environmental hazards? Where else could you dump them?
No wonder the children want no part of this. But they'll likely end up with it anyway; Ma and Pa ain't gon' be around much longer.
"An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice"
"Interesting business model there! Lose a bit on each sale, but make up for it in volume?"
Hobby activity. It wasn't for profit. It was cheaper than paying 100% retail for one good song and 9 filler tracks. Then MP3s hit.
Sounds like the next great attraction at the House on the Rock.
Roll one aside, stick dynamite under it and blow it the hell up.
Record that and then the results both of the trailer and what happened to the phones.
Upload to YouTube, X, etc.
Read the comments for suggestions on what to do with the others.
If this was TV, when the junk-collection team dug into the trailer full of phones, they'd find a dead body. A detective would quip, "looks like he ran out of minutes."
The local phone company, Claro, owned by Carlos Slim, is doing away with all landlines in Puerto Rico. In my neighborhood, they have gone so far as to remove their wires from the poles.
My neighbor had one of the only landlines left in the development last year. He also refuses to own a cell phone. When they pulled down the wires, apparently they were still required to provide service to existing landline customers.
They gave him a cellular tabletop phone. They charge the same landline price as always. Not sure if he still has to pay long distance charges as I used to have to pay woth my landline. OTOH, it has been more than 15 years since I've had a landline so that may have changed.
I have a bluetooth handpiece that looks like it came off of a 1960s dial phone. It links to my cell and works pretty well as a gag.
But a desk phone? With a cable? Gag me with a spoon.
John Henry
Just park one of those trailers to downtown Madison or Milwaukee with a heavy padlock. It'll be looted in 24-hrs flat. Problem solved.
Hobby activity. It wasn't for profit. It was cheaper than paying 100% retail for one good song and 9 filler tracks. Then MP3s hit.
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still with 50/60 was reversed shows brilliance
Enigma "used to sell used audio CDs for 50% of the new price, and buy used ones for 60% of new."
........
Hobby activity. It wasn't for profit. It was cheaper than paying 100% retail for one good song and 9 filler tracks. Then MP3s hit.
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still with 50/60 was reversed shows Harvard level brilliance
Huh. They seem like typical hoarders ("I want to sort it as we go.” Ha. Not.) but seem to have taken good care of them so I would put them in the True Collector category. There's a Facebook group or three for antique phone collectors, wonder if they've trolled that place for buyers.
I am a Typewriter Geek. The nice thing about typewriters is that you can put a piece of paper in 'em and actually use them as they originally were. Phones without a landline. . . not so much.
The whole used recorded music/movie thing has gotten out of hand. VHS Tapes, then DVD then Blue Ray, and now people are just streaming. Music same thing. LPs to tapes to CDs to streaming.
I have a lot of cassette tapes/LPs that duplicate what i have on CD. Now all useless. Books seem to be going the same way, although you get some crazy anomilies. WHen i go on amazon I will often see some DVD of an old movie priced at 100 dollars. Or some used book of Kael Movie Reviews from the 70s at $124.
Who's buying that crap at those prices? It must be some sort of scam or tax dodge.
I have both my rotary dial phones, just no longer wired in because they ruin the DSL signal.
Yes! Here one is as of 2014 click on image
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.
Some new technology has replaced salt and pepper shakers? Have I missed something?
“You may be a hoarder but you are not the only one.”
Yes, nice that they were able to monetize it for so long but there’s more going on here than a failure to change with the changing times. Though I notice that we still have a vacuum repair shop open in our town, which baffles me, so maybe I’m not a great judge of the pace of change.
Polypaks, a "surplus" electronics outfit in the 60s, used to sell used ROMs, "many useful patterns."
I myself bought a core memory frame from some IBM computer. All I needed was a driver and some other computer hardware.
In my mind I pictured old cell phones.
Then I opened the link and saw old-school analog phones.
They are worthless.
Even obsolete cell phones would have some value in the component metal.
“I have a lot of cassette tapes/LPs that duplicate what i have on CD. Now all useless. Books seem to be going the same way”
Physical books are proving to be surprisingly resilient in the digital world. Possibly, and ironically, because they require no power source to operate. As to music, sure, I only buy a CD if I like something so much I want a hard copy. LP’s, like books, have something that can’t really be digitally replicated. The sleeve. Which will become a kind of incunabula in time.
"Physical books are proving to be surprisingly resilient in the digital world. Possibly, and ironically, because they require no power source to operate."
As well, you can be fairly sure the contents haven't been modified to align with somebody's idea about how the book should have been written.
Narayanan: "still with 50/60 was reversed shows Harvard level brilliance"
You just showed "Harvard level" cluelessness about how used items were traded before Ebay, Craigslist, and the web. You are utterly ignorant about how the music market functioned before streaming, and when you had to buy physical LPs, CDs, or cassettes.
Back then there were many, many, many used music/book stores that would hold inventory, pay their rent, pay staff, and take a cut. They'd buy your unwanted stuff and give you a little cash or more store credit. Your only other options were newspaper classified ads ($$$$$$$$$ for a few lines) or front yard / garage sales with limited exposure, or trading with friends. Ebay and the like utterly transformed the used music market.
Back in the 1980s-1990s I'd have been thrilled to take only a 10% loss on a CD. It was way better than having a 35 minute long 1985 $15 CD (inflation adjusted to $40 today) that you hated sitting around.
https://www.amoeba.com/our-stores/buy-sell-trade/how-we-buy/1234
Some people would have just phoned it in, but not that couple.
Their website is www.phonecoinc.com, should anyone want to view their catalog or ask via their AOL email address to have a catalog sent by mail.
Why continue build inventory so out of proportion to sales?
Because with this inventory, once it's gone it is gone. When sales were good, the continued success of the business was reliant upon having a secure source of stock to sell.
I've been a customer of many "electronics surplus" vendors for a long time, and remember many occasions when a big lot of old-stock antique phones was offered it tended to sell-out quickly. I suspect that it would be pretty easy to clear the "ready to sell" stock:
• have a more user-friendly website and
• better marketing copy and layout, and
• lower pricing -- e.g.: current completed listings for similar condition "princess phones" on ebay are 10% - 20% of what I'm seeing here.
My second home is in a cell-service dead-zone and thus has a landline (autoforwarding to the rescue!). I've long thought that I should put a phone that is period-appropriate to the house in what is pretty obviously a phone-niche, so I guess I'm a potential customer.
I've set up a few older relatives with Xtreme Technologies Xlink devices so that their old analog landline phones can ring and answer calls that come to their iPhones when the iPhone is within bluetooth range. It solves the problem of the iPhone on a charger in the kitchen with no-one in earshot upstairs in the office or bedroom -- and the old-style telephones are much easier for oldies to answer successfully than a touchscreen phone. They really don't like to be carrying the phone with them all day around the house, and already had phone extensions on each floor.
So for the cognoscenti it is quite easy to set up any old phone such that your smartphone considers it to be a bluetooth headset.
"immobile" ISWTD
Their website is www.phonecoinc.com, should anyone want to view their catalog or ask via their AOL email address to have a catalog sent by mail.
Why continue build inventory so out of proportion to sales?
Because with this inventory, once it's gone it is gone. When sales were good, the continued success of the business was reliant upon having a secure source of stock to sell.
I've been a customer of many "electronics surplus" vendors for a long time, and remember many occasions when a big lot of old-stock antique phones was offered it tended to sell-out quickly. I suspect that it would be pretty easy to clear the "ready to sell" stock:
• have a more user-friendly website and
• better marketing copy and layout, and
• lower pricing -- e.g.: current completed listings for similar condition "princess phones" on ebay are selling for 10% - 20% of what I'm seeing here.
• sell (drop-ship, don't stock) the adapters that make decorative old analog wired phones useful in voip-systems and as intercoms
My second home is in a cell-service dead-zone and thus has a landline (autoforwarding to the rescue!). I've long thought that I should put a phone that is period-appropriate to the house in what is pretty obviously a phone-niche, so I guess I'm a potential customer.
I've set up a few older relatives with Xtreme Technologies Xlink devices so that their old analog landline phones can ring and answer calls that come to their iPhones when the iPhone is within bluetooth range. It solves the problem of the iPhone on a charger in the kitchen with no-one in earshot upstairs in the office or bedroom -- and the old-style telephones are much easier for oldies to answer successfully than a touchscreen phone. They really don't like to be carrying the phone with them all day around the house, and already had phone extensions on each floor.
So for the cognoscenti it is quite easy to set up any old phone such that your smartphone considers it to be a bluetooth headset.
rhhardin,
Your old desk phones shouldn't interfere with DSL as long as you use the inline filters--at one time the companies handed them out like candy -- AND you don't try to pulse dial with them!
I would think paying a few thousand dollars to a bulldozer operator would get them a pit big enough to bury most of that junk.
Our many family businesses all operate on landlines. It creates some problems, but we manage. Most of the lines are actually forwarded to cell phones. We also write a lot of checks. Our founder has been dead a few months and he was 100 years old. We have no plan to make any changes.
They invested in "Tulip Bulbs".
The scale clearly is very different, but I am reminded of Whitlock's Typewriter store and repair shop in New Haven. It was a fascinating place, and the owner's passing marked the end of an era.
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