Scooters broke free from motorcycles while “faux finishes” and “home staging” also made inaugural appearances this year in Denver’s arbiter of business and consumer trends, the 2006 Dex yellow pages.
“The pages can be a good snapshot of society at any given time,” said Jerry Brown, a Dex spokesman. “We look at various trends and offer new headings and delete old ones as things change.”
Among the new categories, “home staging” helps customers find furniture and other homey touches that realty agents use to make vacant homes look lived in; a “faux finish” is a painting technique.
Topping this year’s unveiling of 15 new categories is “payday loans” with 56 listed businesses, many of which previously existed under the heading of simply “loans” or “check cashing.”
Many payday loan firms jumped at the chance to display their specialty niche in the yellow pages, said Ken Carlson, state director of Express Cash, which has four Colorado offices.
“We used to be under check cashing, but we don’t do check cashing; we just do payday loans,” Carlson said.
Scooters make the scene
Scooters drove onto the phone-book scene this year with four entries after hard lobbying by Colin Shattuck, owner of Sportique Scooters at 32nd Avenue and Pecos Street. The Denver metro area is one of the top 10 scooter markets in the nation.
“We were listed under motorcycles, sales, service and repair,” Shattuck said. “Isn’t that disgusting?”
Health and beauty services also are booming, with the number of “spas – beauty and day” listings up 31 percent from 80 in 2005 to 105 this year.
Teeth whitening muscled its way into the book last year with 10 entries, jumping to 13 in the 2006 book.
Metrosexuals – men interested in health and appearance – are driving the rise in day-spa use, said Michael Simmons, spa director at the St. Julien Hotel and Spa in Boulder.
“We’re guys, but we’re finally comfortable enough to stand in the locker room and say, ‘She did a really good job on my nails,”‘ Simmons said. “There are a lot of health benefits here.”
Dex holds focus groups and relies on other public feedback to decide on new entries.
Customers caught on Net
About 72 percent of adults in Denver used the phone book in the past year, according to media research firm Knowledge Networks/SRI. About 23 percent used www.dexonline.com.
Businesses that buy an ad in the yellow pages also get a free online listing, Brown said. The online and printed versions contain the same listings, but some headings are different in Dex online. There are typically between 3,000 and 4,000 categories in the yellow pages, he said.
If you need a plumber or an electrician, a veterinarian or a doctor, most times you look in the phone book.
But if you want to buy Internet telephone service, it appears you usually research it on the Internet, said Michael Kopetas, an owner of Clarity Telecom in Evergreen, which is under the new listing “Voice over Internet Protocol,” more commonly known as Internet phone service.
“Luckily, we’re nationwide. We get networking business and have a lot of agents on the street,” Kopetas said. “We’re definitely not getting business from the yellow pages.”
Some listings have disappeared from the phone book over the years. For example, you won’t find soda fountains, girdles, fallout shelters or adding machines in the yellow pages these days, Brown said. Dry ice and icemakers get headings; icehouses do not.
Dex yellow pages was sold by Qwest in 2002 for $7.05 billion to Carlyle Group and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe. The private investors sold it last October in a $9.5 billion deal to R.H. Donnelley, based in Cary, N.C.
Dex delivered 1.2 million copies of its white and yellow and Dex Plus directories and 140,000 Spanish-only Dex En Español, starting in January. Donnelley covers 28 states, with the Dex brand in the 14 mostly Western states covered by Qwest. The company is ready to distribute phone books in Minneapolis and plans to deliver new Denver-area community directories in July, Brown said.
Staff writer Beth Potter can be reached at 303-820-1503 or bpotter@denverpost.com.
More choices than ever
For 2006, Dex added 15 new categories to its Yellow Pages.
Air conditioning – portable (1 listing)
Concrete – decorative (4)
Dryer vent cleaning (3)
Faux finishes (2)
Home staging (3)
Hydroseeding (1)
Internet auctions (2)
Meal preparation (10)
Pain management (4)
Payday loans (56)
Schools – online
learning (8)
Scooters (4)
Snow melting
systems (2)
Voice over Internet Protocol services (2)
Wellness (1)
