As I mentioned in my prior post, my dad worked at Western Electric in Montgomery Works back in the day. Before the great divestiture of Ma Bell, Western Electric was a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T. It was a long-lived electrical engineering and manufacturing company founded in 1869. While Montgomery Works evolved to focus on data sets, telephones were Western Electric’s bread and butter.
The series 500 was THE TELEPHONE. It was manufactured from 1950 until 1986. It was durable, acoustic, efficient and only available in black until 1954. The modular components were mounted to a base plate which made it easy to maintain. Ma Bell possessed an extensive policy and infrastructure to recycle and refurbish equipment, all of which contributed to the extraordinary longevity of the 500. Over 25 million 300-type telephones were systematically replaced with this bakelite workhorse.
I couldn’t find how much it cost to lease a phone back in 1950. Phone leasing was a piece of the vertical monopoly that led to Ma Bell’s break up in 1982. There is plenty of information about the cost post-divestiture though. AT&T and Lucent Technologies settled a class action suit over it in 2002. The plaintiffs’ lawyers said that between 1986 and 2001, the companies derived $16 billion from leasing phones. Only $8 million of the $350 million settlement was paid out to 92,000 consumers filed for refunds as of 2005. The payouts were between $15 to $80 depending on the length of the lease.
A wave of colors came forth in 1954 – ivory, green, dark gray, red, brown, yellow, and … a gross melted silly putty beige. Pastel colors arrived in 1957, but you’d have to wait until 1964 to get glorious turquoise!
https://www.oldphoneshop.com/products/western-electric-turquoise-500-telephone.html
The most interesting part of the 500 wasn’t the coil cord that gracefully twined around your finger, the comforting weight of the handset, or even the pleasure of using the rotary dial. It’s the fact that until 1983, Ma Bell owned all the phones. Consumers leased them. The monthly fee included equipment repair which inspired Ma Bell’s care of her telephones.
Phone leases linger and pop up in the news every so often. In 2012, a woman discovered her parents paid the phone lease thinking it was their phone bill to the tune of $6000 over the years. In 2019, the family of a recentlyrecent deceased man discovered he was ‘leasing one trimline phone for $6.45 a month and two touchtone phones for $5.95 a month, which was $20.75 a month.’ That $20.75 per month with taxes, comes out to $249 per year — a total of $8,715 over 35 years.’
Internal documents showed AT&T and Lucent Technology’s appreciation of this cash cow. Unbelievably, you still can lease phones. As part of the breakup, Bell regional companies weren’t permitted to sell or lease telephone equipment, although they could form subsidiaries that could. Lucent Technology was that subsidiary. Then the leasing business moved to AT&T Consumer Lease Services which is now QLT Consumer Lease Services.
Telephone leasing still exists. For a mere $4.45 a month, you can rent a “traditional rotary phone with a classic design and a real bell ringer” from QLT which has a one star BBB rating.
The sales pitch on their website blows my mind.
code & carrot 
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