The Fall of B.C. Tel and the Rise of Consumer choice and savings

Once upon a time in B.C. there was a very high priced telephone monopoly and if you needed a phone you had to rent your phone from this monopoly and to add insult to injury when you got your new phone it was not even NEW but
refurbished or remanufactured.
No, Buying your own phone was not allowed.

You had a choice of two types of phones, black or beige and they all plugged into walls.

If you did not like the rates or crappy service, too bad. No complaining allowed.

So I changed that.

In 1981, I and my young partner out from the Canadian Army and my teen aged daughter started selling used business phones that we bought in from the USA to small business's in Abbotsford.

It was very much against the monopoly law that protected B.C. Tel and it's terrible service and previous century installation and business practices, but we found a small loophole that allowed a business to own it's own phone as long as the business also owned a B.C. Tel phone.

My big change was to go to the B.C. warehouse in Langley and buy up all their surplus business phones, over twenty thousand of them at a fraction of the new phone cost.
Why did they sell them to me?

Because in their arrogance they assumed I was going to sell them offshore to China.
It never entered their minds that a normal person like myself would loook at the market and say to themself, "There's only one company selling telephones and related equipment in B.C. That can't be right."

With the cry of "FREE PHONES" and a lease deal that replaced the excisting B.C. tel rental phones with our "lease to own phones" which became FREE PHONES to the customer at the end of the lease.

(They were FREE when compared to BC Tel's forever rent plan, remember you were not allowed to OWN a phone supplied by B.C. Tel. You could only rent.)

So we started a small business selling these surplus B.C. tel phones to Lower mainland companies and SOLD ALL 20,000 in ONE YEAR.

We sold business phones to all kinds of small business in B.C. including Credit Unions and we destroyed the monopoly power of B.C. Tel and B.C. Tel itelf.
(Look around. Do you see a B.C. Tel sign?)

And.. to make it more fun, take note that all those 20,000 phones I sold were supplied to me by B.C. tel and sold originally to me on the assumption that I was shipping them offshore.

The small business owners purchased my phones and we installed "our" phones and sent the B.C. Tel rental phones that we replaced back to the B.C. Tel telephone warehouse in Langley.

The B.C. Tel warehouse supervisor would then phoned me saying, "Robert we have another 20,000 phones to sell."

"Allright" I said, "I'll take 10,000 at a dollar each."

(Consider that new business phones were $200.00 each wholesale at the time and B.C. tel was selling them to me for $1.00 each)

And that's the way it went, they selling their business phones to me, me selling them into their market, them phoning me again to sell me more of their phones, and with in two years I and other new B.C. tel competitors who recognised a good oportunity when they saw it, took the whole small business market share away from this huge coporation that everyone believed was a solid sure thing, gave local small business better service, choice and cost....and of course we destroyed them.

I created a new way of installing and selling telephones and helped destroy an arrogant over-charging company. Cool.

Yunno, the Real Estate business with it's monopoly power over land transactions, high overhead neighborhood offices that give ZERO value to the Agent or the client, and a backward corporate culture is looking a lot to me like B.C. tel did in the 1980's.