Nickel Equivalent, setting up a payphone collection schedule
Published: 6/28/2024
Nickel Equivalent
By Dan Yarrusso
Definition- How the coin department determined when to go out and collect the coins from the phone so that the total money in the box wouldn’t put the phone out of service.
Objective- To try to collect from the phone before you put it out of service.
History- The single slot coin phone coin bank could hold $50 in nickels or $200 in dimes and quarters to be full. The formula they came up with based everything on the nickel since it took up the most space, but the least amount of money in the coin box. They also used the same formula for the 233 triple slot phones, but their box only held $35 in nickels.
Formula- They would take a new phone and put it out in the field and 30 days later they would collect the money from the phone. Then they would take that money and subtract the nickels from the total, leaving the dimes and quarters. Then they would divide the amount by 4, and then add the nickel amount back in. That would give them the nickel equivalent based on that phone for 30 days. Then divide the nickel equivalent by 30 days and that would give the daily nickel equivalent for that phone. Then they could determine how many days that phone could stay in the field, based on the daily nickel equivalent. There were other factors that we had to take into consideration such as:
1) Time of year- Phones were used more in summer than winter.
2) If the phones were in a bank of phones, and you had an out-of-service phone, it would throw the other phones’ nickel equivalent off and would have to adjust for that.
Not only did they look at the nickel equivalent, but they would also look at the repair records to determine if there was a phone in the bank of phones out. This was used for security too, if no phones were out of order but you had a drop in the nickel equivalent, you would have to determine why they weren’t being used.