For those of us that grew up with Landline Phones, we remember talking to friends and girlfriends on our landlines for hours. You had to have the longest cords so you could hide in the room next to the kitchen for privacy. Before call-waiting your parents would yell at you to get off the phone because, "Grandma's calling from Arizona in 5 Minutes"!
More proof that everything old is new again … Gen Z is bringing back the landline. Very few people own landlines these days. In fact, according to the Washington Post, barely 25% of Americans lived in homes that had one in 2022. But the nostalgia-loving Zoomers are embracing the cord – as a way to disconnect. They don’t need a landline, but they want one because it reminds them of simpler times.
“I love the novelty of talking to my friends and sitting in one place,” one Gen Z woman named Sunny told The Guardian. “When I’m having a long text conversation with a friend, I’ll just ask if we can speak over the phone and catch up.”
“There’s no caller ID, so I can’t screen who’s calling,” said 27-year-old Sam Casper, who owns an old-school pink rotary dial phone that was her "mom’s husband’s grandma’s phone." “If I meet a new friend and they’re the type of person I’d invite back to my house, they get the landline. Whenever I hear my phone ringing, I get so giddy. I love to just sit there and talk and twirl the little cord.”
Unfortunately, this embrace of landline nostalgia may be short-lived. Service providers, like AT&T in California, are looking to phase out landlines altogether, calling them a“historical curiosity that’s no longer necessary."