Tuesday, December 19, 2006

What's the 411

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

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just for the record, Sabrina had the computer. I would have had it much faster.

Keisha said...

Does it cost you anything to text?

SABRINA said...

Sorry!!! Josh just said look up Old Navy's phone number. So I looked up the one closest to me, in Rogers. What took me the longest was finding the "locate a store" button on the Old Navy website.

Unknown said...

I think it costs about $0.10 a text message so it could cost as much $0.20 If you have a text messaging package it would be less.

kellyk said...

wow. interesting. i like the 1800free411. way better.