Jim,

>
>I wonder what the chances are that the pay phone 'owners' are actually subsidiaries of the phone company??
>

I'm sure in some cases the pay phones are owned straight up by phone companies, without hiding behind a smaller company. But, often times they are not at all. I had a customer was in the pay phone business. Further, I had customers (restaurants, for example) that had pay phones; the pay phones were owned by obviously small operations. I'm also aware of a large movie theatre chain that owns their own payphones...they consider it a profit center (albeit a small one) and they found it more effective to manage them themselves instead of outsourcing. Movie theatres have a lot of kids hanging around w/o cell phones, "Mom, I need a ride :)"


>In Canada we have 5 BIG banks and 50-60 smaller outfits. The big banks are removing their ATM machines all over the place and wierd-branded machines are taking their place. An investigation showed that 3 such of the three brands found were companies owned by one or other of the big banks!
>
>MBAs looking for loopholes and sucking as hard as possible.

Changing topic, I sure would like to come and visit Canada sometime.