Yellow Pages Kumbaya at City Hall

Today on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall gathered an assortment of directory industry advocates. With a proposed opt-in ordinance on the city supervisors agenda, industry advocates gathered to mount a vocal effort to bring logic to the forefront.

While constituents included Valley Yellow Pages, AT&T Yellow Pages and other niche Yellow Pages publications serving the Hispanic and LGBT communities, it was the small-business owners who were most vocal in their opposition to the opt-in ordinance.

As an electrician appropriately described, passage of the opt-in bill could cause his business considerable harm. He claims to get 90 percent of his leads through the print Yellow Pages. Furthermore, the downstream consequences of the opt-in bill could be to significantly reduce the number of jobs in San Francisco.

He went on to say that without the leads, he’d file for fewer permits at City Hall, purchase less fuel in the City of SF, eat fewer lunches working jobs in SF and reduce his overall contribution to the SF economy. Time will tell if the supervisors recognize the flaws of an opt-in agenda, but if you listen to the small-business owner, its shortcomings are abundantly clear.