Odd, I've never seen this in any kitchen.
People who live in homes built in the 90s and earlier usually still have the plug for them. We hid ours behind a picture till we remodelled. If you visit someone in an older home, ask if they have the plug. It should be on the wall more than four feet up just as you're leaving the kitchen.
Sometimes people would buy an extra long cord (they snap into the receiver and base so swapping out was as easy as putting in a usb), and you could walk around the house clotheslining your siblings or stand in place and turn too much getting trapped in it. Fun times.
Ours was red. It was a thing of beauty.
Oregon trail generation here, and yup! It's been wild to watch tech go from landlines, then add answering machines, fax machines, modems, then pagers, and finally cell-phones. In retrospect, why the kitchen??
As I remember it as a kid, people spent a lot of time in the kitchen. May have even wanted to chat on the phone while cooking. And there was no real counter space that you wanted to waste with a phone. So that's why they were mounted on the wall.
Nope, I'm not American.
