There used to be a particular restaurant I ordered from. It was a real restaurant, not a ghost kitchen. It was listed on Uber Eats and similar, but you could also order from them, which was significantly cheaper. We used to have an image of the menu and the phone number but eventually lost it. Because the restaurant was only listed on Facebook, none of us have a Facebook account, and Facebook aggressively tries to keep you out without an account, it was a royal pain to get the number back. But even after getting the phone number, it was WhatsApp only. Which I don’t use. Some of my friends do, so that was taken care of like that.

There was another place which was on the brink of closing and kept shifting its opening hours and days. I went there on occasion but because there was no official web presence I couldn’t trust the hours online (photographs of the schedule). So I called. Sometimes they picked up, sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t, sometimes they were closed but other times were just busy and couldn’t come to the phone.

So no, you can’t always find a phone number, and you can’t always call and ask. Having a roughly up-to-date web presence is very useful. It doesn’t need to be a bespoke website, you can use a platform, just don’t exclusively use closed garbage like Facebook and Instagram which walls you off from customers.

> How do you know this place even exists without any information?

You want to find an antique book store in another state. How do you find it? You search the web. And what information bubbles to the top of the search results? Answer: businesses with websites.

If you are a business owner, you will lose customers without a website, because that is how most people will find you.

You might not like it... but that is the reality.

The phone. Wow. Great solution..... Literally the whole point of putting information online is so your employees don't have to waste time answering the same question 999999x per day.

> You can't even find a phone #? How about calling and asking?

Wait what? How does he contact the website if he can't find contact info?

I don't disagree with your point BTW — not everyone needs a website. But at the same time, a business often needs to meet customers where they are. If they're OK with losing a small subset of customers because their business info is only on <insert platform here> and some people don't use said platform, then I don't see what's wrong with that. But if they're not OK with that, then they'll have a presence on more platforms which could include their own websites.

At the end of the day I don't really understand why anyone's arguing about any of this. If a business finds value in a website and it serves their business interests, they'll probably have one. If not, then they won't have one. No amount of philosophizing over democratizing the web will make my local café make a website.