Search for a business by phone number

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. There are a couple of reasons why this service should allow searches by phone number: 1) When the business name is difficult or impossible to spell with the phone keypad or voice recognition. 2) When I have a phone number to a business and I want to know the address to this business (without calling them). Some GPS units have this capability, where you can search and locate a business just by phone number. 3) When I know all the information and only want to use GOOG411 to make a free call to this business.

A. The point of the service is to connect you to the business. If you already have the number, it is simpler and faster to just dial the number. As for being connected for free, if you are using a mobile phone, you will be charged airtime anyway. As for getting the address, as you mentioned, you can call the business directly and ask them. Most of the cost of your average phone call is not spent paying for trunk/line time. Air time on cell calls really doesn't cost that much. What one is paying for, for the most part, is the costs of administration, so the per minute costs are considerably higher in order to compensate. If most phone calls were on the order of hours rather than minutes, or if administration was cheaper, the rate scale would change appropriately. Since this administration is mostly automated, however, you don't take that much of an efficiency hit in the long run. Toll booths, on the other hand, are already inefficient to start with. You need a larger right-of-way (to handle the toll plaza) on any remotely busy road, as well as the tollbooths and toll collector(s). Ticket systems do minimize an efficiency hit, but only for longer stretches of road with a limited number of access points, and that aren't used by the daily commute. Making change takes time, after all. Coin systems process more cars per hour, but they lower average traffic speed, and the manpower requirements are generally higher, since one has to maintain larger number of toll collectors near those hamlets off in BFE, if you've got large chunks of road away from the urban areas. Unless toll transponders (as well as toll roads) became considerably more commonplace, you wouldn't be seeing that much of an efficiency savings, and toll roads (as opposed to untolled roads) don't provide any advantage to your average Tom, Dick, and Harry. (TD&H still pay for the roads, but the payments are pulled more quietly than a toll road would be.)

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