Pay phones remaining in the US

There is something deeply human about our ability to notice that as Americans hung up their pay phones between 2002 and 2022, they simultaneously began consuming yogurt with the dedication of people who had discovered a religious text written in cultured dairy. The correlation sits at a bruising 0.979, which is to say these two variables are moving together with the kind of synchronicity usually reserved for synchronized swimmers who have trained together since childhood. One went down, the other went up, and we noticed, which was our first mistake.

The culprit is almost certainly not that people were trading phone booth time for yogurt breaks, though one can imagine worse lifestyle decisions. What's actually happening is that both trends are children of the same vast parent: the rise of smartphone adoption and the simultaneous transformation of American food culture toward health-conscious convenience. Between 2002 and 2022, the smartphone went from nonexistent to nearly ubiquitous—roughly 85 percent of Americans now carry one—which means pay phones became as useful as a left-handed corkscrew. Meanwhile, yogurt went from a exotic European curiosity to something you could buy in a convenient tube while waiting for your phone to charge. Population growth, younger demographics with different food preferences, the rise of grocery store density in suburbs, marketing budgets that treated yogurt like it was medicine: all of these were accelerating together in the same direction.

This is what pattern-seeking does to us. We find a nearly perfect inverse relationship between two phenomena that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and for a moment—just a moment—we feel like we've glimpsed the secret architecture of the universe. Then we remember that correlation is famously promiscuous and moves in with whatever causation happens to be standing nearby. The real lesson is not that yogurt killed the pay phone, but that sometimes two unrelated things will dance together for twenty years just to see if anyone is paying attention.