Twelve Things That Will Be Obsolete in 10 Years

Once indispensable, those thick yellow tomes are now wasteful snail-mail spam.

There was a time when the Yellow Pages made sense. Finding businesses was hard – a directory delivered to every home in Canada made it easy.

Today, we don't live in such a world. Many rural communities don't have Yellow Pages – they aren't "profitable" enough – and in urban centres, thanks to virtually ubiquitous internet access, fewer and fewer people need them.

I can't remember the last time I used the Yellow Pages. It was at least a decade ago. Ask my friends, they can't remember either. Indeed, everyone I've asked said their Yellow Pages either sits in their building lobby untouched until carted away, or they personally move it directly to the recycling bin.

This is a business model that is broken. It creates a huge amount of waste and delivers an unwanted service to millions and millions of Canadians, without creating value for them or their community. In fact, let's just call this what it is: the Yellow Pages are spam. It's mail I didn't want, didn't ask for, and get rid of as soon as I receive it.

Even the Yellow Pages company knows it’s moving towards obsolescence. Over the past five years, its stock has lost two-thirds of its value. Even its own research can't give companies a compelling reason to advertise. The Yellow Pages Group Co. claims that 61 per cent of Canadians aged 18 and over use their directories at least once a month. Of course, you can't read the report on which the claim is made, so you just have to take their word for it. But this is likely based on a phone survey, which excludes cell phones which would favour older respondents who don't use the internet.

So at best, some people use the Yellow Pages maybe 12 times a year? Compare this to the dozens of times most urban Canadians look for businesses on the internet every day. If in 10 years (or even one year) Canadian businesses continue to use a print directory as a way to communicate with potential clients, I shudder to think about how competitive we will be on the world stage. Does staying in a rut – especially one that serves your business less and less effectively – constitute the best of Canadian business thinking? And of course, the cost of the lazy practice is millions upon millions of directories that get printed, shipped around the country, and delivered to people who don't even want them.

However, unlike with some of the other things you’ll read about in this series, there is something you can do to help make the Yellow Pages obsolete faster. You can now opt out of receiving the directory. Of course, Yellow Pages is in no rush to tell Canadians about it. So I thought we could help them.

A few weeks ago I created a Facebook group to inform people about the 30-second process they can go through to stop getting the Yellow Pages. No pressure to join, but if you do you can join the thousands of Canadians who are helping save a few trees while letting Yellow Pages, and the advertisers who still use them, know how ridiculous their business model is. Maybe we won't have to wait a whole 10 years for the Yellow Pages to become obsolete.