Pay phones remaining in the US

As the last pay phones were quietly removed from American streets between 2003 and 2022, online dating revenue rose to fill the vacuum they left, correlating inversely at -0.9665 across twenty years. The most romantic interpretation is that Americans, deprived of the last truly anonymous communication technology, were forced to move their connection-seeking online, where it would cost them a monthly subscription fee. The least romantic interpretation is that both trends reflect mobile phone adoption, which made pay phones obsolete and made swiping possible. Both interpretations end with someone paying for something they used to do for a quarter.

Pay phones in the US declined from approximately 2 million in 1999 to under 100,000 by 2022 and fewer still today, a direct casualty of mobile phone ubiquity. Online dating revenue grew from nearly nothing in the early 2000s to over $3 billion annually by the 2020s, driven by the mainstreaming of platforms from Match.com through Tinder and Hinge. The shared causal variable is obvious: mobile internet adoption made one technology redundant and enabled the other. This is one of the rarer cases where a spurious-looking correlation has a genuine common-cause explanation.

Sometimes a correlation with a common cause is not spurious at all—it is simply incomplete. The pay phone and the dating app are two consequences of the same technological revolution, which makes this correlation less amusing and more just true.