Paging Service Firm Hangs It Up Abruptly
A paging service company that closed its doors Wednesday and fired all of its staff might have to leave its estimated 50,000 customers in Orange County and Los Angeles without service, its founder said.
Company founder Larry Nichols blamed the financial woes of EconoPage of Southern California Inc. on national paging giant PageNet Inc., which supplied air time that EconoPage sold to customers. The Santa Ana company said PageNet was planning to terminate EconoPage’s contract on May 31, even though EconoPage has paid all of its bills.
PageNet officials insisted, however, that Nichols’ company had outstanding debt.
“We were really surprised at the news of them shutting down, because they still had several days to pay us before we cut them off,” said Thomas Phelan, vice president and general manager for PageNet’s Orange County offices.
Phelan, who said company staff had not been able to reach Nichols on Wednesday, declined to say how much EconoPage owed PageNet.
The Santa Ana company has suffered from marketing and customer troubles since a San Jose firm with a similar name unexpectedly shut down several months ago, cutting off 200,000 Bay Area customers.
After Econopage Inc. of San Jose shut down, the Orange County company became the subject of rumors that it was headed for a similar fate.
At one point, the Santa Ana company obtained a court order barring a competitor from spreading the rumors.
When Nichols started the firm in 1995, he said he wanted to use a “popular” corporate name.
“At the time, there were about 30 different companies in the U.S. using the phrase ‘econopage’ in some fashion or other,” said Nichols, whose company had eight stores and 32 employees. “We joined marketing forces with the one out of the Bay Area.”
Nichols and the staff at Econopage Inc. of San Jose ran joint newspaper advertisements featuring just the name “Econopage” and the slogan “44 West Coast Locations to Serve You.” Both positioned themselves as discount chains. And both companies bought blocks of air time from PageNet, and resold them in year-long contracts to customers.
Yet they were financially separate entities, Nichols said.
