Pay phones remaining in the US

As pay phones have vanished from the American landscape with the quiet dignity of a technology that knows its time has passed, farmers markets have appeared with the noisy enthusiasm of a culture that has rediscovered the concept of buying things in person from people who grew them. The correlation is -0.969 across eighteen years, which suggests either that farmers markets are being built on the graves of phone booths or that Americans have simply redirected their appetite for public gathering places from one kind of booth to another. Superman would have nowhere to change.

Pay phones declined from about 1.7 million in 2005 to fewer than 100,000 by 2022, made obsolete by the smartphone that now lives in every pocket. Farmers markets grew from roughly 3,500 to over 8,700 during the same period, driven by the local food movement, farm-to-table culture, and the peculiar modern desire to spend Saturday mornings paying three times the supermarket price for a tomato you can shake the farmer's hand over. Both trends are children of the smartphone era: the phone killed pay phones directly, and it indirectly fueled farmers markets by enabling the Instagram-friendly, locally-sourced, wellness-oriented lifestyle that makes standing in a parking lot buying arugula feel like a moral achievement.

Eighteen years of pay phones disappearing and farmers markets appearing is one of the tidier metaphors for American cultural evolution: we traded impersonal communication for personal commerce, the coin slot for the card reader, and the phone cord for the reusable tote bag. The correlation is almost too neat, which is usually a sign that it means less than it appears. The quarters, at least, are finally free.