Around the same time frame, my brother rented some rooms in his house to people who had the occupation of actually delivering those phone books. (This was in a different country, but apparently the Yellow Pages existed everywhere.)
The delivery-people got overwhelmed and eventually just resorted to putting the stacks and stacks of phone books into piles and burning them. It took a long time until they got caught because nobody really misses a phone book.
Pre-internet the commercial phone book was actually fairly useful. The "problem" was that most people didn't need it updating as often as the phone book company would have liked.
The delivery-people got overwhelmed and eventually just resorted to putting the stacks and stacks of phone books into piles and burning them. It took a long time until they got caught because nobody really misses a phone book.