Every six months or so, I receive the Yellow Pages for my city and surrounding regions. For the past seven years, I’ve noticed a very interesting phenomenon. If you look at the first page of the White Pages section, it is all a bunch of companies with prefixes: “A”, “AA”, “AAA”, and so on. The number of As before the actual company name just seems to grow every year.
I like to call this phenomenon “phonebook front-loading“. In political primary elections, frontloading is a phenomenon whereby states move their primaries closer to the beginning of the year in order to get more television coverage. New Hampshire currently has the earliest primary election date. The media coverage in the state during that time is absolutely overwhelming.
Similarly in phonebook frontloading, companies prefix their name with several As in order to get listed at the top of the White Pages, which are sorted alphabetically. Thus, you can expect several pages of the White Pages to be filled with about a dozen or more AAAA Locksmiths, AAAA Storage companies, AAAA Towing, and AAAA AAAs.
However, with the huge proliferation of A companies, could phonebook front-loading be having an adverse effect on those companies? Personally, I am detracted by the more-or-less homogenous page of AAAA companies subliminally claiming to have “A” ratings. I usually skip that section in the White Pages in search of better and more reputable companies that don’t have to front-load the phonebook.
Perhaps one day, I should make my own company called AAAAA AAA & AA. My company would not only be listed first in all phonebook directories worldwide, but it would make superior Triple-A and Double-A batteries. They would be so good, that I’d get an A++++ rating from the BBB for these batteries. After all, what else could you give batteries that run for 5 centuries straight?
