PHANTOM BUSINESSES: A CURIOUS PHENOMENON

(Submitted for today’s BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM.)

No, the curious phenomenon is not me posting three times in a single day–though that is unusual, at least recently. I work within spitting distance of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a city of about 15,000. In our local phone book, there’s a listing for an “Express Coffee Shop” on “Physical Road” in Beaver Dam.

I found it curious that there would be a coffee shop that close to me which I didn’t know anything about. I can tell you the relative quality of the java at almost any gas station or restaurant between here and Milwaukee or Madison. And I’d never heard of “Express Coffee Shop” . . . or “Physical Road.”

More amazingly, neither had Yahoo Maps, MapQuest, Rand McNally . . . or the city of Beaver Dam. For that matter, the other phone book for this area hadn’t heard of “Express Coffee Shop” either.

I glanced through the phone book and found several listings in Beaver Dam for non-descript businesses on either “Physical Road” or “Virtual Road.” Guess what? Nobody could find “Virtual Road” either.

So I did what any sensible nebbish would do: I started calling those businesses, trying to find out where they were located. I called three numbers. Two led to recordings that told me “this number has been disconnected at the request of the customer” and one led to a recording stating “all circuits are busy.”

I am familiar with something map companies do to prevent copyright infringement: they insert non-existent towns or roads on their maps. Thus, if anyone does pirate one of their maps, they have built-in proof of the crime: the towns, roads, or other features which don’t exist.

I suspect that the phone book publisher is doing something similar. (For what it’s worth, I can look up any of the Physical or Virtual Road businesses on most major telephone search engines.) While I understand and support their desire to protect their copyright, a little common sense should tell them that creating fictitious businesses in a town of 15,000 people is going to lead to confusion. Nobody could call every coffee shop in, say, Detroit to verify their existence; however, there are only six coffee shops listed in the Fond du Lac/Beaver Dam yellow pages. And the only one (the only real one) in Beaver Dam closed months ago. So it’s pretty obvious what the company is trying to do: They’re trying to protect their information, but in the process, they’re making their product less useful to consumers. That’s fine for a map, but for a phone book in a small city, it’s a big negative.

I’d be curious to know if your local phone books also have phantom businesses.