How did you become aware of prepaid phonecards?
"Just by traveling around Europe. It didn't dawn on me that I should have
started even earlier. It was just an accident that got me started. I had to make a phone call at an airport where there were no coin booths, only card phones. Somebody actually had to lend us a card in order for us to make that call. Then, a few days later, I ran into a Hiscocks' catalog. It was the first and it had only been published a week before. After that, I became intrigued. I said to myself, 'Gee, this could be fun collecting,' and the rest, as they say, is history.
"What gets me now is I used to see them for years around the airport in Milan. These were some of the original cards that were used at that time, and both the booths and the cards could only be found at the airports in Italy. Shortly thereafter they removed those phones and put in the card phones you see today. I should have bought the things then and there because it was five years before I saw the same cards afterwards."
There's an incredible amount of information about phonecards that the American public doesn't know. Do you see the same thing?
"Absolutely.I wouldn't even say that it's just American collectors but collectors in general. This goes for stamps as well. For one thing, collectors usually become too provincial. For instance, they only collect cards from their country and don't pay attention to what's happening elsewhere. I collect cards from the entire world. I am forced to keep up with all kinds of weird things."
Sounds like a heck of a job.
"It is! It's hard work, but true collecting as far as I'm concerned is hard work. You can't just sit back and wait for people to tell you what are the good new cards.
"Let's look at how I collect. Let's take a country, say Spain. It's a country that has long sets. Most of my collection is mint, because it is the only way you can be sure you have every thing. It's the same with stamps. If you try to get the set used, you are going to find that the low and high values are practically impossible to get. The low values are usually bought by dealers in volume and the high values are hard to get because almost nobody buys them. So, the easiest solution, which is actually an expensive solution as well, is to buy a whole set mint. Just buy the cards and be done with them."
So here I am, Joe Public Average
- American. I want to buy some phonecards. I don't really know that much about them. What should I do? What questions should I ask from a person who is tsying to sell me their cards?
"I get calls all the time. Now, for example, let's use one company that called me. I asked how many cards are in the set? The company tells me there are three cards. What's the price of the set? $180. These are actual figures I'm quoting you. How many minutes do I get? There are 10 minutes to a card. So, actually, I'm getting 30 minutes of real phone time for $180. Do I buy these things? Of course not! They might argue that they are only 2,000 of them 2,000 sets of something like that usually only ends up in the hands of collectors or dealers. That is not what a phonecard is supposed to be about to me.
"Now, another company might issue 500,000 cards and you are lucky to get one. Take that NBC fall TV series promotion that was done by Sprint. I made over 60 calls using just about every telephone number I knew to get just one of those cards.
"By my definition that's a real collectible. So, what I'm doing with the U.S. is I'm sticking to about 20 to 25 companies that are doing real promotional campaigns with their cards. Those I try to find as many as I can get.
Is there anything the industry should do?
"All the industry should try to do is
educate the public so they use the cards. Nobody can force you to collect anything. People who want to collect will find your cards."
Lifted from Moneycard Collector, Dec. 1996
The author is employed at AmeriVox corporate headquarters
