Introducing In-WATS

In August 1967 the British model Twiggy traveled to Chicago, Illinois, where she attended a press luncheon held by Aldens, a division of the retail conglomerate Gamble/Skogmo. The purpose of the luncheon was to announce Aldens’ new marketing drive. Company executives described its technical details as the Mod icon and fall catalog cover girl quietly ate her lunch. Aldens, its executives explained, was embarking on a drive to double its customer base and establish millions of new credit accounts. To attract them, the mail-order house had placed a sixteen-page advertising insert in a late-summer issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Magazine in hand, the Post’s seven million readers could shop the “mini-catalog” for everything from fall fashions to Super 8 cameras and then place their orders by mail or telephone. If they chose the latter, they could use Aldens’ “Jet Phone Service” and call toll-free. While they were on the line, new customers would have the opportunity to establish a charge account then and there, thanks to the state-of-the-art IBM 360 commissioned for the project, capable of approving credit in just eight minutes. “We’re not sure what will happen when 28 million people pick up their phones to order merchandise,” Henry A. Johnson, vice president of Aldens, cracked. After lunch, Twiggy hosted a short fashion show that, among other items, featured a silver raincoat and a matching pair of boots.^{Footnote 7}

If the 800-number had a debut, it was that day in Chicago. AT&T had introduced In-WATS earlier that year, and the twenty lines that Aldens leased for the campaign was the program’s most ambitious use to date. And if Chicago’s Ambassador West Hotel lacked the high-modern pomp of AT&T’s World’s Fair pavilion, where Picturephone and Touch-Tone dialing had been introduced three years earlier, the event nevertheless captured a bit of that era’s fading glimmer.^{Footnote 8} Like those products, In-WATS’ lineage could be traced back to the 1950s when AT&T began to overhaul its Long Lines networks for a coming information age. That project was intended specifically to replace Long Lines’ electromechanical systems with modern electronics. More generally, though, it aimed to fortify Bell’s dominance in telecommunications for the decades ahead.^{Footnote 9} Of the two, 800-service probably owed more to the latter objective. In the mid-1950s, dozens of large corporations lobbied the Federal Communications Commission for greater access to the electromagnetic spectrum’s high-frequency radio bands. The idea was to use new microwave-relay technologies that operated in these upper reaches to build private long-distance lines, or to at least be able to raise that threat to AT&T. The FCC was sympathetic to these requests, and in 1959 liberalized access to the “above 890” megahertz band. Hoping to preempt a wave of outside network building, a chastened AT&T developed a series of new private-line (TELPAK), data-transmission (DataPhone), and call-management products (Centrex) aimed at large corporate users.^{Footnote 10} Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS), introduced in 1961, was one such product. It allowed subscribers to place outward long-distance calls within specified regions for a flat monthly fee. Although direct marketers showed an immediate interest in it, AT&T saw the WATS market largely in corporate sales and interoffice communication. The program was popular; within a year, more than fifteen hundred businesses had signed up.^{Footnote 11}

In 1967 a sister program, Incoming or Inward WATS, was introduced. Usually called In-WATS (later, 800-service), the program allowed subscribers to lease long-distance trunk lines, each one assigned an 800 “area” code that callers could dial toll-free. Subscribers were billed on a monthly rate based on the regions included and the number of hours the line was in service. The program clearly built on the popularity of WATS’ flat-fee structure, but it also fit it into Bell’s plans to modernize its network infrastructure by automating many of the collect calls—each of which required operator assistance— that passed over its lines each day.^{Footnote 12} Though it tends to bring things like wires, pipes, and highways to mind, infrastructure is really a blend of hard and soft technologies. It is the “stuff you can kick”^{Footnote 13} and the “cultural systems”—language, conventions, and classificatory schema—that govern the interpretation, use, and experience of that stuff.^{Footnote 14} In-WATS was essentially soft infrastructure. Certainly, there was a hard component to it. After all, a technician had to come install the line. At its core, though, 800-service was a way of categorizing telephone calls and then applying a novel billing structure to them. In phone company parlance, it was an “automatic reverse billing service”^{Footnote 15} that assigned charges to the recipient rather than the caller. Although it lacked the pizazz of a PicturePhone, 800-service was the sort of managerial innovation that, as Thomas P. Hughes has argued, often provides the nuclei for growth and change in mature, large-scale systems.^{Footnote 16} Once in place, the deceivingly simple In-WATS eventually allowed for something that had yet to happen in the first ninety years of telephony: telephone shopping jumped scale from the local level, where it long been common, to the national level, where it had been relatively limited.^{Footnote 17}

The early users of In-WATS were a diverse group. Some, like carpet manufacturer C. H. Masland & Sons, adopted it as a goodwill gesture to the company’s more than two thousand national dealers. Others, like Whirlpool, which developed a heavily advertised “Cool Line,” used it for customer-service inquiries. The most eager reception, however, came from the travel industry. Almost immediately, Howard Johnson’s installed In-WATS lines at its regional reservation centers to handle booking for the chain’s 320 hotels. Not surprisingly, Holiday Inn and Sheraton quickly followed suit.^{Footnote 18}At a time when most Americans rarely, if ever, called long-distance, In-WATS lines had great promotional value. Sheraton, for instance, made its number into the hook for a well-known radio jingle. For the cost-cutters at these companies, however, the real value was logistical in nature: In-WATS offered a platform for consolidating phone operations. Both the Hertz and Avis rental car companies built centralized offices in the early 1970s to field questions and distress calls from anywhere in the country. Oil companies, travel services firms, and banks were drawn to In-WATS for similar reasons, only in their case the interest lay in centralizing the card authorization requests phoned in from countless gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and shops scattered across the continent. Before long, a cottage industry of contract call centers began to sprout up.^{Footnote 19}

Thanks to its widespread adoption and heavy promotion in travel-related services, 800-service became closely associated with the field in the first half of the 1970s. The cover of Toll-Free Digest (1976), a national directory of 800-numbers published at mid-decade, featured nothing but travel services on its cover. To the extent that the gimmicky publication was of use, it was probably limited to that line of work. In an era when widely read futurists like Alvin Toffler placed the tourist trade’s “experience makers” at the vanguard of a postindustrial way of life,^{Footnote 20} the travel and telecommunication fields were closely associated. In the 1960s, the airlines had been the earliest adopters of sophisticated real-time computer systems previously limited to defense realms. Travel was also the foundation on which national credit and payment networks such as Diner’s Club and American Express were built in the postwar years. By the early 1970s, these networks were also undergoing rapid computerization.^{Footnote 21} In this way, the field of travel offered an advance look at the day when everyday consumer transactions would play out across a complex web of telecommunication, distribution, and information networks.

Before long, it was expected that middle-class homes would be linked into these networks as well. Visions of electronic shopping took a variety of forms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they shared a belief that new video technologies (cable TV, video cassettes, video telephony); computers; modernized telecommunication networks (coaxial cable, modernized phone lines); push-button systems; direct-marketing channels; and “cashless, checkless” payment systems would coalesce into some form of an at-home shopping interface.^{Footnote 22} At Bell, PicturePhone and the digital network underpinning it were expected to carry this load, but toll-free long-distance was a necessary background element. Indeed, even before IN-WATS was formally introduced, AT&T officials were intimating its arrival during direct-mail industry events. At the 1966 gathering of Direct Mail Days, a New York Telephone executive dazzled the crowd by describing, in the words of mail-order veteran Henry Hoke Jr., “a store or mail order firm, that would never be closed” thanks to a combination of toll-free lines, push-button phones, and voice-response technologies.^{Footnote 23} Electronic ordering, then, was the corollary to electronic payment. Soon the day would come, predicted Bell Labs scientist John R. Pierce in 1967, “when nothing need go through the mail except actual goods. A combination of voice and punching buttons will do the rest.”^{Footnote 24} Other influential voices echoed this refrain. “You’re going to have a different approach to shopping, to distribution as a result of direct order by interrelations between touch-tone dial and TV,” observed John Diebold, the nation’s most vocal proponent of automation. “You’re going to do more direct purchasing and ordering.”^{Footnote 25}

Having long wrestled with problems of selling and buying at a distance, direct marketers considered themselves uniquely qualified to forecast what this new world of electronic payment and store-less shopping would look like. Indeed, as Andrew Case has argued, direct marketers, who felt burdened by the antiquated image of direct mail, were eager to reinvent themselves and their field as direct response or direct marketing, a data-intensive alternative to mass marketing.^{Footnote 26} Historically, direct marketing was typified by catalogs and other kinds of direct mail, but by the 1970s it was widely understood to also include direct-response print, television, and radio ads, syndicated bill inserts, telephone solicitation campaigns, and developmental technologies such as video cassettes, PicturePhone, and interactive cable.^{Footnote 27}

Among the field’s most imaginative figures was Lawrence G. Chait, the consultant behind Aldens’ 1967 In-WATS campaign. Chait’s background was in direct mail, having handled subscription sales efforts at Dow Jones and Time, Inc. before founding a consultancy in the mid-1950s. Like many in the field, Chait was intensely interested in new communication technologies.^{Footnote 28} What really captivated him, though, was credit. As a frequent conference speaker in the mid-1960s, he began laying out his vision for how the rise of computers, mass-marketed credit, and conglomerates would revolutionize the relationship between corporations and consumers by both intensifying and elongating it over time. “Maybe you sell the bride her original wedding dress and ... the husband a tux,” he remarked to a gathering of credit card executives in 1966. “But what about satisfying the lifetime needs of newlyweds .... the essential food, clothing, and shelter?” The way to do so, he explained, was through “Packaged Universal Lifetime Credit” (PULC) plans, which would be “based upon the average consumer’s lifetime income and total lifetime requirements.”^{Footnote 29} No money would change hands. Instead, a monthly fee based on actuarial tables would be charged to their credit accounts. The newlyweds in question would likely have several PULCs: one for goods, another for transportation, another for entertainment, and so forth. To another audience the following year, Chait offered Gamble/Skogmo—which, along with owning Aldens, also owned supermarkets, drugstores, department stores, and boutiques—as a company uniquely positioned to make PULCs a reality, especially if it were to merge with a large financial firm.^{Footnote 30}

Aldens’ 1967 marketing drive offered Chait an opportunity to put some of his ideas to a test. The fact that it was the largest implementation of In-WATS to date won the program close attention in the trade press.^{Footnote 31} Given that retailers had long made use of telephone sales, what was so novel about what Aldens was doing? After all, the largest catalogers—Sears and Montgomery Ward—had devoted much of their efforts in the postwar era to building a national network of telephone sales outlets. Sears shoppers, for instance, could either visit or call the local Telethrift office to place orders. Those orders were then telexed to the closest fulfillment plant where the goods were packaged, shipped, and made ready for pickup, or sometimes delivered, the next day.^{Footnote 32} What set Aldens’ initiative apart from programs like Telethrift was its use of long-distance telephony and the centralization it afforded. Indeed, Sears’ entire Telethrift system could be seen as an elaborate relay network built to bypass AT&T’s Long Lines. In-WATS made the expensive and laborious process of building a network of catalog stores unnecessary. One telephone number and one well-equipped call center could cover whole regions or even the entire nation.^{Footnote 33}

The 800-number, in this way, had a streamlined beauty to it. Not incidentally, it carried the exclusive overtones of a long-distance call at a time when local calls outnumbered them by a roughly 20:1 margin. Moreover, other than on special occasions, like Mother’s Day, toll calls were a rare occurrence outside of upper-income households.^{Footnote 34} Aldens’ branding—“jet-phone service”—capitalized on this cachet by framing teleshopping in light of the glamour and modernity of jet travel, still less than a decade old at the time.^{Footnote 35} Not unlike air travel, ordinary telephony, or “plain old telephone service,” had undergone its own revolution over the previous decade as the basic act of placing a call changed in significant ways. Direct Distance Dialing, which eliminated the need for operator assistance, was gradually introduced over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s. More recently, Bell had begun rolling out All Number Calling, which did away with alphabetical prefixes, and Touch-Tone dialing, which replaced the familiar purr of the rotary dial with the musical tones of a push-button keypad, itself a novel interface recently designed at Bell Labs. Thus, picking up a phone, punching in a ten-digit code, and activating a veritable hotline to a distant city would have had a distinctly modern feel in 1967. “There’s a certain magic to a long-distance call ... even for the most sophisticated,” Advertising Age’s Bob Stone gushed. “And if you, the prospect don’t have to pay the cost—WOW!”^{Footnote 36}

“Wow” factor or not, the campaign was something of a failure. The “public is not used to the convenience as yet,” concluded the Reporter of Direct Mail Advertising. They “may hesitate to do business at long distance by phone. Mail orders exceeded phone orders by a wide margin.”^{Footnote 37} Aldens’ Henry Johnson was more blunt, admitting at a conference a few years later that the program fell flat. Only 5 percent of orders were called in. Nevertheless, there was a sense in the field that Chait’s program had offered a glimpse of the day when new telecommunication services and computer technologies would provide the backbone for long-distance retailing. For these reasons, the program could still be applauded for at least having started the process of modernizing a service and distribution sector that many business observers considered woefully backward.^{Footnote 38}

Industrializing Service

In the years ahead, the leading advocate of this view was the management theorist Theodore Levitt. Between the 1960s and 1980s, Levitt’s influence in marketing thought was wide and deep. He came to prominence in 1960 with the widely read essay “Marketing Myopia,” which diagnosed the inability of old-line firms to recognize the fundamental business they were in, for instance, not trains but transportation.^{Footnote 39} Indeed, Chait’s PULC plans were a reworking of this basic premise. Later in his career, Levitt was credited with introducing notions of globalization into business discourse. In between, he was interested in the “technocratic hamburger,” or the possibilities of industrializing a stubbornly retrograde service sector.^{Footnote 40} As he saw it, one industry that was moving in the right direction was telemarketing. “With the availability of Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS lines), FX calls, 800-numbers (inbound WATS), and declining long-distance telephone charges,” Levitt observed, “telephone selling that is organized with production-line rationality has become a major means for the industrialization of various kinds of selling and sales-related communications.”^{Footnote 41} In particular, Levitt singled out Murray Roman’s Campaign Communications, Inc. (CCI), a telemarketing consultancy and call shop that not incidentally promoted its services as a telephonic realization of the “technocratic hamburger.” For Roman, this was a blend of hardware—telephone systems geared to handle high-volumes of continuous call traffic— and software—operator or “communicator” training programs and scripts. Together, the system produced thousands of highly orchestrated conversations in which operators might solicit names, addresses, and other valuable bits of data as well as answer questions, field orders, upsell customers, run credit checks, and process payments.^{Footnote 42}

Thus for marketing theorists like Levitt and Roman, In-WATS’ potential was understood in relation to larger processes of automation that were broadly transforming back-office clerical work in the 1970s.^{Footnote 43}An 800-number was part of the equation, but so too were computerized inventory systems, CRT terminals, and carefully designed work flows. This was not a minority view. After the mid-1960s, it was widely understood among management consultants that computerization projects that merely tried to speed up paperwork were behind the times. Rather, the future lay in efforts that combined computers, communication networks, and organizational restructuring measures to exact change across a range of operations.^{Footnote 44}

Absent some larger plan of this type, telecommunication consultants warned against any hasty instillation of In-WATS lines. As Aldens’ experiments with “jet-phone service” suggested, what wowed industry watchers might go almost unnoticed by ordinary consumers. When toll-free lines did succeed in attracting callers, were the benefits—many of which were hard to value, such as consumer courtesy or a state-of-the-art image—enough to outweigh the costs? “Inward WATS is very stylish,” Frank Griesinger noted.^{Footnote 45} Like any other part of a company’s physical plant, though, managers needed to ask themselves: “Is it your most economic choice? Will it reduce costs?”^{Footnote 46} In this way, marketers considering 800-service were advised to think less like salespersons and more like systems engineers, utilizing what Roman called the “telephone machine.”^{Footnote 47} Units moved were important, of course, but so were questions of load factor and optimization. Roman, for instance, cited “seasonal peaks and valleys” as one of the industry’s biggest pitfalls. To ward off dead periods, marketers needed to continuously stimulate calls by developing novel sales offers and aggressively publicizing their toll-free lines in catalogs, commercials, and direct mail pieces, but even that could have its perils if the response overwhelmed an office’s capacity.^{Footnote 48}

For many firms, the “optimum response mechanism” was a contract call center in which the rents paid on In-WATS lines were capitalized across many accounts. Ultimately, it was through these large-scale operations that telephone shopping and credit card payment really met. Atlanta’s National Data Corp. (NDC), for instance, carved out an important niche in capturing orders for direct marketers and processing payments for credit card issuers. The company was founded in 1967 by George W. Thorpe, a veteran of the state-of-the-art data-processing centers at the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC). Looking for commercial applications for the computer know-how he developed at SAC, Thorpe settled on gas card authorizations and quickly moved into credit card verifications for various merchants, airlines, and payment networks. By the early 1970s, NDC needed approximately 170 In-WATS lines to field its incoming calls. Around the same time, NDC began to merge the account information of these credit card holders into a single database. This provided a foundation for automating much of the credit-checking process by creating a central hub that operators at NDC’s regional call centers could tap into from afar. By the late 1970s, NDC’s “voice centers” were operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and were linked into the authorization networks for MasterCharge (Interbank), Visa (BankAmericard), and Carte Blanche (Diner’s Club). There, operators sitting at CRT-equipped workstations, at which they fielded upwards of sixty-five calls an hour, need only to type a mail-order customer’s order into one database and their credit card number into another and in seconds credit began to flow. During the holiday rush in December 1978 alone, the company’s Atlanta call center handled more than two million calls.^{Footnote 49} Although technically feasible according to contemporary descriptions, it is unclear whether NDC had direct access to its mail-order customers’ inventory systems. The norm was to deliver magnetic tape or printouts containing order information. This was even the case for direct marketers who handled their own order capture operations. At Spiegel, for example, the company had to fly its magnetic tapes between its suburban Philadelphia call center and its Chicago warehouse each night.^{Footnote 50}

Looking ahead, though, complete automation was the “real wave of the future,” according to retail executives like J. C. Penney’s Donald Siebert, who pointed to a Sears–Simpson experiment in Canada that allowed callers’ touchtone phones to interface directly with the company’s computer databases.^{Footnote 51} What this meant for catalog shoppers and consumers in general, predicted science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, was a new world of buttons and numbers: “The code number of the item, the number desired, the individual’s own code number, the code number of his credit reserve—numbers, numbers, numbers.”^{Footnote 52} As the push-button future neared, though, some questioned how appealing consumers would actually find it. When Warner Communications announced plans in 1977 for an experimental two-way cable system (Qube) in Columbus, Ohio, which was slated to include electronic shopping features, media analyst Tony Schwartz was skeptical: “I push a button when I want an elevator to come to my floor, but I’d hate to buy a suit that way.”^{Footnote 53} Whatever their technological merits, for Schwartz there was a degree of overkill to push-button systems like Qube. As he saw it, 800-service had already effectively modernized home shopping.

By that point, there were concrete examples of just how lucrative a direct-marketing operation could be when it was built around an 800-number. Perhaps the most widely cited in the mid-1970s was Joseph Sugarman’s JS&A National Sales Group, a purveyor of pricey electronic gadgets. Sugarman began selling pocket calculators through the mail in 1971, and by the following year was a regular advertiser in the Wall Street Journal. Struck by the number of customers who opted to call in, despite the long-distance charges, and to pay by credit card, Sugarman began experimenting with 800-service in October 1973. The first ad produced a flurry of calls, and by 1974 the company needed six In-WATS lines to field its order traffic. JS&A grew quickly during this period, going from a four-person outfit operating out of the basement of Sugarman’s suburban Chicago home to a company of sixty operating out of a nearby industrial park, where his offices were “equipped with every conceivable modern piece of space-age office equipment.”^{Footnote 54} The company’s rapid growth and novel approach attracted attention in marketing circles. Sugarman’s method was to test-market his products—pocket CB radios, electronic ion generators, and so on—before rolling out a national ad campaign to drive calls to the firm’s 800-number. The whole system was predicated on convenience and speed. As he explained in 1975: “The customer who may not have wanted to bother writing a letter or filling out a coupon, finding an envelope and stamps, and going out to the mail box will pick up the phone and give us his credit card number. Because the credit card companies do the collecting, we have no cash flow problems.”^{Footnote 55} Sugarman could then pour that capital into yet another batch of products and start the process all over again. By 1978, when the Direct Marketing Association of America named Sugarman its Man of the Year, JS&A was doing $12 million in sales per year and was sending its triannual catalog to a million homes.^{Footnote 56}

Established catalogers like Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) also shifted to 800-service during this period. The Seattle-based wilderness outfitter had operated a makeshift mail-order business since the 1940s. By the time mail-order sales surpassed store sales in 1971, REI’s mail-order arm had grown into a sophisticated operation built around computerized mailing lists and colorful catalogs featuring vivid nature photography. For homebased shoppers, REI had long accepted telephone orders, provided that the caller was willing to pay the long distance charges. In 1976 the company began offering an 800-number. This was the first in a series of moves to completely overhaul the company’s catalog operations. The following year, REI began a gradual move out of Seattle proper when it built a state-of-the-art fulfillment center in suburban Tukwila, Washington. As it settled into its exurban enclave, REI’s inventory and mail-order systems were further computerized. At the same time, the company’s calling hours were extended. Before REI adopted 800-service, its phone lines were open during standard office hours. Afterward, the company’s call center was staffed fourteen hours a day Mondays through Fridays and for another eight hours on Saturdays. By December 1979, REI’s twenty-one operators were fielding twenty-four thousand calls per month. It was probably fitting, then, that when the celebrated mountaineer Jim Whittaker, the first American to climb Mt. Everest, stepped down from REI’s presidency that year, his replacement was a twenty-year veteran of Sears, Roebuck.^{Footnote 57}

REI’s overhaul was particularly ambitious, but its move toward phone sales was not unusual. Indeed, by that point 800-service was becoming an institutionalized part of direct marketing. An estimated forty-five thousand In-WATS lines were devoted to fielding orders by 1980. According to a 1983 report by marketing scholar Esther Lazaros, 78 percent of the 182 firms she contacted had put those lines into service in the half-decade spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s. REI’s longer calling hours were not outside the norm either. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Lazaros’s respondents offered calling hours that exceeded the standard eight- to nine-hour workday. In fact, the second largest group (27 percent) offered twenty-four-hour service, seven days a week. As she explained it, staying open all night was the only way to capture “true spontaneity,” like the $2,400 purchase phoned into the ultra-exclusive Horchow at 2 a.m. one evening. “Had she waited until the following day,” Lazaros reported, “she would never have ordered.”^{Footnote 58}

Cream Skimming and Upscaling

As 800-marketing grew after the mid-1970s, it began to strain the limits of the communication infrastructures upon which it was built. This played out in several ways. For one, especially successful 800-number campaigns sometimes overwhelmed the carrying capacity of Bell System networks. This was most pronounced in cities that emerged as hubs for the new call center industry, such as Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha was home to the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, and as such the Cold War hotspot had been equipped with double the telecommunications capacity a city its size normally warranted. With circuits to spare, Northwestern Bell capitalized on this surplus capacity, the city’s geographic centrality, and its residents’ “neutral” accent to lure hotel, rental car, and credit card firms looking to consolidate their telephone operations. By the mid-1970s, an entire call center economy had grown up around firms such as Telemark and WATS Marketing of America. Nevertheless, even in the “1-800 capital of America,” as Omaha started calling itself, Bell’s circuits could be pushed to their limits.^{Footnote 59}

A marketing program for the Canadian Olympic Coin Program, designed by Lawrence Chait, CCI, and Information Management Inc. (IMI; an Omaha call center) in 1975 provides an example. Developed to raise capital for the upcoming games in Montreal, the campaign centered on network television advertisements starring track-and-field legend Jesse Owens. In the commercials, Owens introduced a twenty-eight-piece sterling silver collection, priced at more than $300, and then directed viewers to an 800-number to find out more.^{Footnote 60} The spots were more effective than anticipated, and IMI was flooded with inquiries each time it aired, maxing out the twenty-four In-WATS lines the call center had devoted to the campaign. As a result, tens of thousands of calls were blocked. On one especially busy Sunday, more than 7,200 of the 9,010 calls placed could not get through. This not only created a crisis for the Coin Program but also wreaked havoc on Northwestern Bell’s local network and AT&T’s Long Lines. “At certain points,” reported one attendee at an emergency meeting convened with Bell System representatives, “this problem is so severe as to make it virtually impossible for a normal individual and commercial traffic to complete long-distance calls.” IMI responded by nearly quadrupling the number of lines devoted to the coin program.^{Footnote 61} Far from an isolated episode, similar incidents occurred in the years ahead. In August 1977 a surge of Omaha-bound calls, sparked by commercials for Elvis Presley records rushed to air after the singer’s death, again caused serious long-distance outages. “All direct marketing records were shattered the next three days,” one industry veteran recalled.^{Footnote 62} By that point, using a single 800-number in combination with network TV spots had become the industry’s “biggest no-no,” according to an Advertising Age report, precisely because of the known potential to jam regional phone circuits.^{Footnote 63}

Regional blackouts were in a way a reflection of In-WATS’ success, although not one that would have pleased the engineering-minded veterans of the Bell System. In contrast to the slowly dying PicturePhone, 800-service simply grew and grew, with revenues on average increasing annually by a third during most of the 1970s. By 1980, the WATS programs together were bringing in more than $4.4 billion a year.^{Footnote 64} Under normal circumstances, they would have constituted an unmitigated success, but the 1970s were not normal times for Ma Bell, which suddenly found itself besieged by new competitors and antagonistic regulators. Competition was a situation that was neither familiar nor welcome for the Bell System, which had since the Progressive Era enjoyed a near-monopoly on U.S. telephony.^{Footnote 65} Since then, AT&T had grown into the largest corporation in the world. In fact, by 1969 the company was so large a logo change had to be rolled out over the course of a half-decade.^{Footnote 66} This astounding size and scope gave the Bell System a Sphinx-like quality, the business writer John Brooks observed in 1976: “It ends up meaning to the observer not what he sees but what he is.”^{Footnote 67} To its partisans, the Bell System was a model blend of private enterprise and public purpose. To its detractors, depending on their politics, the system either represented the worst excesses of monopoly capitalism or the deadening hand of the regulatory state.^{Footnote 68}

By the turn of the 1970s, Bell’s detractors had the upper hand. In the 1968 Carterfone decision, the FCC broke Bell-subsidiary Western Electric’s monopoly on the telephone equipment market. Going forward, Bell could no longer bar “foreign” equipment from attaching to its lines, and almost immediately hundreds of companies poured into this new “interconnect” market. A year later, the FCC signaled its intent to open up long-distance markets by approving the request of Microwave Communications, Inc. (MCI) to operate a common-carrier network between Chicago, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri. The biggest blow came in 1974 when the U.S. Department of Justice began the process of bringing antitrust charges against AT&T, claiming that in the years since the Carterfone and MCI cases the company had actively thwarted competition in the markets those decisions had meant to open up.^{Footnote 69}

In this way, the telecommunications landscape 800-service took shape within was fundamentally different from the one it was launched in. The companies, organizations, and call centers that built new systems around telemarketing could buy their phones, switchboards, call routers, answering machines, and countless other products from dozens of companies. NDC, for example, bought the sophisticated automatic-call distributors that controlled its traffic from Collins Communications, a Rockwell International subsidiary. When 800-service was introduced in 1967, however, those markets belonged exclusively to Western Electric. The call centers themselves, which, after all, were in the business of reselling long-distance services, also tread on AT&T’s onetime monopoly. Even the lines themselves were fair game after 1980, when the FCC authorized competitors like MCI to resell the WATS and In-WATS lines they leased from AT&T. In many cases, they were then turned into trunk lines for cut-rate long-distance plans marketed to residential users. The loss of business in these lucrative markets was exactly what Bell advocates had in mind when they leveled charges of “cream skimming,” a term widely used at the time. The general idea was that the industry’s newcomers were allowed to target the most profitable markets (the cream), while Bell was left to maintain the costly national grid that made those markets possible in the first place. As more and more cream made its way into outside coffers, AT&T executives warned they would have no choice but to abandon the intricate cross-subsidization programs that were the linchpin of Bell’s claims to public service.^{Footnote 70}

At their core, questions of cream skimming were questions of fairness. They only made sense in an economic landscape in which stewardship over large, growing industries had effectively been vested by the state to a handful of companies, and in some cases just one. In exchange for monopoly or cartel-like conditions, these corporations were expected to subordinate the profit motive, at least in its purest form, to ends that were social in nature, in particular system quality and equity of access. Nowhere was this mindset more deeply ingrained than the Bell System, which was sometimes called “a conspiracy of engineers to take advantage of businessmen.”^{Footnote 71} Although one can imagine that the independents of telephony’s early decades would have found it highly ironic, if not incredulous, that AT&T was now making pleas for fairness,^{Footnote 72} Bell System executives in the 1970s were not wrong to see a double standard. There were in fact two overlapping standards: an old familiar paradigm that rewarded public mindedness and an emerging paradigm that privileged profit-maximization. As Henry Boettinger, a longtime AT&T executive, made the case in a 1977 coffee-table book written to mark the telephone’s centennial, Bell’s “social objective, endorsed for a century by the nation” was fundamentally at odds “with the cold dogmas of economic theorems which were used to justify demands for radical policy changes.”^{Footnote 73} However, as dogma gained traction in policy circles, the cultural terrain in which appeals to fairness might hold their ground was steadily being eroded and the industries embedded in it uprooted.^{Footnote 74}

Similar changes were playing out on mail order’s fulfillment end. There also, another pillar of American communication, the U.S. Postal Service (before 1970, the U.S. Post Office), found itself losing ground to more specialized competitors. In the late 1960s, direct marketers had several delivery options to choose from. The most established was the Post Office’s once celebrated but now widely maligned Parcel Post. Although Parcel Post underwent a major modernization program in the mid-1970s, these improvements were too little (the program itself was widely lampooned) and too late to reverse the inroads already made by United Parcel Service (UPS).^{Footnote 75} The for-profit UPS had its roots in the messenger trade of Seattle, Washington, in the early twentieth century and grew to national prominence in the decades ahead as a department-store delivery service. In the early 1950s, UPS began remaking itself into a common carrier with a specialty in fast-shipping services. Over the next two decades, UPS perfected its system, and by 1977 the one billion packages it handled each year were three times that of Parcel Post. That year, the upstart Federal Express won its fight to add jumbo jets to its overnight delivery fleet when legislation aimed at deregulating the air cargo field was signed into law. Although the bulk of Federal Express’ traffic was between businesses, the company’s innovative hub-and-spoke system was mimicked by UPS, which built its own fast-delivery hub in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1982. As these developments played out, UPS emerged as the preferred shipping method for upmarket catalogs like REI and Spiegel. Industry watchers made note of the Postal Service’s dwindling role. At a retail management conference in 1979, the marketing scholar Eleanor G. May pointed out that as more and more orders were phoned in and more and more goods were shipped by UPS, the Postal Service’s only real role in mail order would be “delivery of the catalog itself.”^{Footnote 76} Watching the parcel delivery business slip away, U.S. Postal Service officials also leveled charges of cream skimming.^{Footnote 77} Parcel Post had to provide service everywhere, they explained, no matter how small or remote the town, while UPS and Federal Express were free to concentrate on the lucrative metropolitan markets. Like Bell, the Postal Service spoke a dying language of infrastructural stewardship that carried little sway with policymakers anymore.

Shrugging off charges of cream skimming, UPS and Federal Express understood themselves to be responding to large-scale shifts in how Americans lived and shopped. UPS started its postwar transformation when the company’s management sensed that the downtown department stores it serviced were on the verge of a steep decline. Nearly twenty years later, Federal Express’ novel air-delivery plan was based on a similar sense that metropolitan populations would only grow more diffuse.^{Footnote 78} Similar thinking shaped the direct marketing field where, like elsewhere in the retail industry, a general theory of urban decline held sway. Lester Wunderman, of Wunderman, Ricotta & Kline (WRK), for instance, also imagined the old and even not-so-old shopping and entertainment districts as fallow land in the years ahead. Wunderman called this the “marketing implosion.” Such predictions were not unlike those rendered by Bell Lab’s John Pierce and others a decade earlier, but in the interim they had been updated to reflect the gloomier tones of a stagflation-afflicted and oil-shocked nation. “When a telephone call uses the equivalent of a half a teaspoon of gasoline,” Wunderman opined, “it becomes clear that the phone will replace many of the functions that now require transportation.”^{Footnote 79}

If the home would be “the shopping center of the future,” as Wunderman suggested, who would shop there?^{Footnote 80} Industry thinking, according to analyst John Witek, was that the typical patron would be “a white, middle-class married couple in their thirties with two school-age children,” living somewhere in the suburban Sunbelt, having fled there from the Northeast and Midwest.^{Footnote 81} To the extent that electronic shopping’s junction of long-distance lines, cargo planes, and electronic payments constituted a place, it was one in which the clientele stood in stark contrast to that of an aging and colorful downtown. There was a sad irony to this whitening of mail order, especially for African Americans, for whom catalogs had historically been a refuge from the indignities they faced at shops and stores. Mail order’s deracialized alternative was threatening enough in some places to spur catalog burnings and rumors that merchants like Sears and Ward were themselves black.^{Footnote 82} As the catalog trade remade itself, African Americans and other predominantly working-class populations fell into the wrong income bracket for mail-order marketers, who had figured out their own version of cream skimming: upscaling.

No cataloger provided a more dramatic illustration of the upscaling process than Spiegel. Perennially the third of Chicago’s Big Four merchants, Spiegel had long catered to the small-town, “easy credit” consumers of the South and Midwest. In 1976, parent company Beneficial Group brought in Henry Johnson, formerly of Aldens, to remake the catalog house. In short order, Johnson closed Spiegel’s catalog stores, added 800-service, moved its headquarters from Chicago’s South Side to suburban Oak Brook, recruited a new cadre of managers from the world of high-end retail, and broke the industry norm by accepting bank-issued credit cards like Visa and Master Charge.^{Footnote 83} The goal was to purge Spiegel’s blue-collar customer-base, many of whom were abandoning catalogs for discount chains anyway, and cultivate an entirely new clientele: middle- and upper-middle-class women.^{Footnote 84}

Johnson understood retail’s changing landscape well. In fact, he saw Spiegel’s move to Oak Brook, an “edge city” of gleaming new shopping malls and office parks, as a prerequisite to recruiting outside talent. His real genius, though, was recognizing that if the landscape of middle-class consumption was changing, so too was the clock. There were “two new facts of life” in retail, Johnson maintained. One was the escalating cost of operating a store. The second was that every year, increasing numbers of middle-class women spent traditional retail hours working and, like other commuters, battling afternoon traffic.^{Footnote 85} Dual incomes and time-starved schedules were, of course, nothing new to blue-collar and working-poor households. These lower-income shoppers, however, were of little interest to Johnson; indeed, this was precisely the clientele Spiegel wanted to drop. Its interest was in the shopper who had to miss the afternoon trip to Marshall Fields, not Woolworth’s. Demographically, according to Spiegel’s marketing plans, this shopper was an 18- to 45-year-old woman with at least one child and a comfortable income.^{Footnote 86} Psychographically, Johnson explained, she was the “upscale, busy lady … a person, a human being with power you had better recognize.”^{Footnote 87} In essence, Spiegel’s new market was the mythical supermom, as sociologist Arlie Hochschild characterized her, who stared out from millions of magazine pages each month, “briefcase in one hand, smiling child in another.”^{Footnote 88} Behind this Madison Avenue creation was the “grim reality” of the second shift, or hectic evenings of housework and child care after a long day at the office.^{Footnote 89} Although Johnson would have been unlikely to describe it this way, after-hours catalog shopping was part of the speed-up at home, or maybe a few minutes reprieve from it.

To find its new clientele, Spiegel bought new mailing lists. The company also built its own list through catalog offers in the New Yorker and other upmarket magazines.^{Footnote 90} In the ads themselves, an emphasis was placed on positioning Spiegel as a peer to high-end department stores rather than mass-market merchandisers like Sears and J. C. Penney. WRK, which handled the campaign, tried out taglines such as “a unique kind of store right in your home” and visually referenced the downtown shopping emporiums of old. The ultimate goal, however, was to establish Spiegel as the place women shopped instead of department stores. To get this across, WRK tried out premiums like an “un-shopping bag”: the bag you no longer needed for the store you were too busy to visit.^{Footnote 91} The underlying “promise” unifying Spiegel’s marketing at the time, WRK explained, was that “shopping at home at your convenience (anywhere, anytime)” did not have to mean sacrificing high-end quality.^{Footnote 92} If on on the surface “anywhere, anytime” shopping sounded vague, it actually had a very specific meaning at Spiegel: at home and at night by telephone. “Our goal,” Johnson explained early in the transformation process, “is to make it easy for her to pick up the phone, call in an order toll-free, giving the number of her credit card if she has one, and receive the merchandise at her home by United Parcel Service or Parcel Post.”^{Footnote 93}

Selling the phone as a shopping device was, in this regard, as important a task as selling Spiegel’s new upmarket image. Indeed, one came to symbolize the other. The company began using In-WATS lines on an experimental basis a year after Johnson joined the company. In 1978 Spiegel rolled out its 800-service in full and established a call center in suburban Philadelphia. To drive orders there, in the late 1970s WRK gave the telephone top billing in Spiegel’s advertising. At the very least, most of the company’s ads featured a bright red telephone with a catalog propped against it. Others directly illustrated it in use. A 1979 advertisement in Mademoiselle, for instance, pictured a stylish, young career woman lounging on a couch with a telephone and catalog in hand. On the ground next to her sat a cup of tea, a briefcase, and a stack of files.^{Footnote 94} Here was the speed-up, but it was an alluring vision of that dwindling time budget: a teacup instead of an unwashed baby bottle and an attaché case instead of a laundry basket.

Along with the telephone, Spiegel’s late 1970s advertising imagery placed a heavy emphasis on credit cards. In each advertisement, a gallery of American Express, Visa, Master Charge, and Spiegel cards were prominently displayed, sometimes appearing more than once on the same page. UPS got a boastful mention in most ads as well: “We deliver by United Parcel—to your home, your place of work or wherever you like,” “Delivered to your door via United Parcel,” and so on. Spiegel’s advertising of the era offers a good window into how universal credit and upscale tastes could be packaged in terms of professional-class identity and second-wave notions of feminine agency.^{Footnote 95} The ads also provide a good illustration of just how concerted and didactic efforts were at the time to persuade audiences to see toll-free lines, bank-issued credit cards, and parcel-delivery services as fundamentally related; these were not three distinct networks but rather a single retail channel that was altogether new. Spiegel’s updated version of catalog shopping looked all the more modern in contrast to industry giants like Sears, which provided a kind of technological foil. Despite its mid-1970s experiments with computerized phone systems in Canada, Sears continued to steer U.S. callers to local catalog stores that only accepted the company’s proprietary credit card deep into the 1980s. At Spiegel, efforts to uproot the company from anything so tangible as catalog desks and credit departments paid off. By 1981 telephone calls accounted for 40 percent of the company’s orders. Three years later, that figure reached 75 percent, and nine out of ten of those buyers paid by credit card. All the while, Spiegel’s Philadelphia call center grew to include 250 call stations that were staffed fifteen hours a day. A second call center, equipped with an additional 170 In-WATS lines, was opened in Reno, Nevada, in 1983. That year Spiegel’s sales topped $500 million for the first time. The company’s “metamorphosis” was by then complete, having turned over 90 percent of its customer base. And with his eye on a billion in annual sales, Johnson was scouting sites for a third call center.^{Footnote 96}

As more and more orders made their way to call centers in Philadelphia, Omaha, Atlanta, and other cities, the operating hours of the consumer market began to change. For some people, these changes meant capping off a long day by paging through a catalog, and maybe one night buying that kayak or Cuisinart^® food processor. For others, it meant the topsy-turvy social lives and body rhythms of nights at the call center, waiting for those orders to come in. For the companies that leased the trunk lines connecting them, 800-numbers and the fulfillment machinery they attached to were capital that lay dormant so long as no one was there to answer the phone. Of course, mail order customers had always been free to fill out order forms whenever they liked. Moreover, labor disputes over night-work date at least as far back as the “early closing” movement of the mid-nineteenth century, when gas lighting dramatically lengthened the retail day.^{Footnote 97} The late postwar era was another period when the selling clock was thrown into flux. As Gary Cross and Vicki Howard have each noted, the fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, and discount chains that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s operated on a much longer clock than traditional retail. As older shopping institutions were forced to mimic them, Cross argues, consumerism breached some of its last temporal barriers.^{Footnote 98} The stretching of the catalog day in the 1970s mirrored these developments. There was something different about late-night telephone shopping, though: it happened from home. The phone added the anywhere to the anytime.