714/657 Area Codes

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

But I think a wiser way to go at this point would be to make every phone number a 10 digit number (making the area code a permanent, non-optional part of every number) and work from there.

Which is essentially what they're doing with these overlays. They're just doing it gradually.

I don't understand why we don't just go to an 8-digit phone number like France does. What's with all the stupid extra area codes when we could just add a zero on the end of all existing numbers and multiply the number of available numbers in every existing area code.

Because 1-800-FLOWERS0 looks stupid.

Plus, there are still around 600 area codes that are unused. That's ~500,000,000 phone numbers, enough for every single individual in this country to get yet another phone and still have a couple hundred unused numbers. Why change the whole system?