The showroom isn't ready yet and the Kenmore small appliances seem to have disappeared into the backrooms for now but work has been completed on the new carpet. Furthermore, they started fixing all the broken floor files and repainted the walls in the tools section as well now. They've also installed new LED lights both inside the store (notably above the old escalators), as well as on the exterior building. Goodbye dim exterior and hello cozy and lit up Sears building! 😌

Forgot to mention, they've also started repainting the merchandise pickup section and got rid of the old vending machine and sadly the payphone as well. They told me apparently it was shipped back to Hoffman Estates, no idea why lol.

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[–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

It would be prohibitively expensive.

It was likely not a regular telephone with a pay-box on it, those were really uncommon since the 1990s at the latest because they were really easy to hack for free calls. Stores all had to have a service provider maintain the phone, then they’d pay the provider.

Nowadays there are far fewer providers for pay-phones, obviously, and it would be expensive to maintain for essentially no use.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Every pay phone I've seen had a paybox on it - the exceptions being certain ones in airports.

    Must be a CA thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    You misread my comment, so I’m not sure how to clarify without explaining exactly what I meant. Sorry for the wall of text but maybe it’s interesting!

    I said “It was likely not a regular telephone with a pay-box on it,” which you seem to have read as “there are lots of phones with no pay-boxes.”

    What I was saying, which I thought was clarified by the rest of the comment (I was totally wrong, for the record), was that most payphones after the 1980s were a special kind of phone that a store would have to pay someone else to maintain… as opposed to literally just a phone that had a pay-box on it.

    Those existed (“just phones with pay-boxes”), is the thing, but I didn’t want to get into details about it before.

    Stores used to just have their own phone that they converted to require coins to operate. Then they moved to buying full pay phones with the pay box incorporated. But they couldn’t control everything and by the 1970s it was easy to make free calls using “customer-owned” telephones. In the phone hacking community they were called “COCOTs,” customer-owned, customer-operated telephones. Because they were owned and operated by that store.

    Which is a reason why huge companies (like Bell) eventually owned the phones, and each store had to pay a big company to maintain them.

    Hopefully that context helps explain what I meant!

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