Reach out and Confuse Someone

What a deal! One of the most heavily advertised “10-10” numbers offers 99 cents for calls up to twenty minutes. And that’s actually a good buy under certain circumstances. But there’s a Veiled Variable lurking in the circuits. The 99-cent charge is a blanket price, you pay 99 cents regardless of whether you talk for one minute or for nineteen. So a one-minute call—a connection, perhaps, to somebody’s answering machine—is going to cost you roughly a dollar a minute. Another “10-10” service requires you to talk at least ten minutes to get the advertised savings. Anything below that, and you pay at a higher rate. Another buries a 10 cent per call “connection fee” in the fine print at the bottom of its TV ad. ¹ These services, called “dial-around” services because you literally dial around your long-distance carrier by entering the 10-10 code, have become popular. About 11 percent of American households use them. In 1998, consumers spent about $2 billion on dial-around services, and the total is expected to reach about $3 billion by the end of 1999. ²