In my constant struggle to "save more, spend less and avoid getting ripped off" I went on a search today for the perfect way to look up a phone number. The first thing I thought of was the phone book, but these are hard to find while driving. I also thought of just dialing 411 on my cell phone but that costs almost $2. I narrowed it down to 3 choices and decided to find out which was the best. I tested it by trying to find the number to Old Navy in Fayetteville. Here they are.
1. Call a friend and talk them into looking it up online.
I called my friend Josh and asked him to look up the number. Turns out he was actually home so he looked it up. This took 2 Minutes and 2 seconds. The only cost was having to make small talk. But I ended up with the number to the Rogers store.
2. 1800-free 411
This is like the regular 411 service except you have to listen to an ad before they give you the number. it took 1 minute and 42 seconds. I did have to make a call to Brian to get this number but I didn't count that time.
3. Text message google
This was the coolest and quickest solution. I wrote a text message with the text "old navy fayetteville ar" and texted it to the number "googl" which if you work out the numbers is 46645. A few seconds latter they texted me back the address and phone number. Even with my slow text messaging skills, this only took 1 minute and 35 seconds.
Tim
