Pay phones remaining in the US

Between 2002 and 2022, US per capita ice cream consumption and the number of remaining pay phones both declined, correlating at 0.9647 across twenty-one years. The unified theory is that the same infrastructure neglect that allowed pay phones to disappear also allowed the ice cream supply chain to atrophy, but this theory requires you to believe that AT&T and Ben & Jerry's share a boardroom, which they do not. The simpler truth is that both represent peak-America artifacts that have been in gentle decline: one because nobody calls anyone anymore, and one because the health-conscious consumer has discovered frozen yogurt. Both losses are mourned by approximately the same number of people.

Pay phones declined from roughly 2 million in the early 2000s to under 100,000 by 2022, a direct casualty of mobile phone ubiquity. Per capita ice cream consumption declined modestly from about 26 pounds per person to under 23 pounds, driven by health consciousness, lactose sensitivity awareness, and competition from alternative frozen desserts. Both are gentle declines across a 21-year window, one driven by technological substitution and the other by dietary shifts.

Twenty-one years of two gently declining metrics will produce a strong correlation. The pay phone and the ice cream cone are both artifacts of a previous era, declining for entirely different reasons but at compatible rates.