Just like you were late to dropping cheques vs chip and pin, the US has been a laggard in consumer adoption of some technologies. Might be something to do with the relative power of your state governments vs federal meaning your infrastructure is sometimes less co-ordinated, as a guess.
The US still had huge pager numbers when consumers in the EU was all in on text messages.
For example this article discusses low SMS usage in the US from 2000:
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/07/technology/us-is-lagging-...
Just like you were late to dropping cheques vs chip and pin, the US has been a laggard in consumer adoption of some technologies. Might be something to do with the relative power of your state governments vs federal meaning your infrastructure is sometimes less co-ordinated, as a guess.