Push To Talk is retarded

I was doing a job at a gas station the other day and I swear I've never seen so many people talking at their cell phones before. The incessant "BEEDLEBEEP" was obnoxious. Why do you people use that shit? I thought the whole idea behind Push to talk was that they will cut you some slack on your telephone costs in exchange for you:

• giving up call privacy,
• giving up some audio fidelity and
• talking like a jackass into an upturned cell phone

but I looked at verizon's website and it appears that push to talk will set you back anywhere between $10 and $20 extra/month, and of course you can only PTT with other verizon subscribers.... and you can call them for free ANYWAY. So is there some magical convenience in using a half-duplex speakerphone that i'm just not seeing? It looks retarded and its far more annoying than just....y'know, calling people.

Furthermore, Because this communication is always half-duplex (one person talks at a time), not only are you able to communicate less information in the same time frame, you're going to use exactly HALF of the bandwidth that you would with a regular call of the same length, even more so when you consider the time spent waiting for a chirp in response. You're actually SAVING your provider money, and you're paying for the privilege. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? It doesn't look cool, It isn't convenient, and it certainly isn't saving you any money. PTT sucks. end of story.