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For example, Western Union introduced “metal money” in 1914, a metal plate given to select customers allowing them to defer payment, and a decade later General Petroleum Corporation issued similar metal cards for gas and repair services at their gas stations. The idea continued to expand in the early 20th century. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter
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Still, the technological transformation from ledger book to plastic cards took a while. These credit indicators were only good at one store, but they were really the beginning of consumer credit in the way we think of it today.
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So, stores would provide a means of identification with the name of the store, and perhaps a number to confirm you were who you said you were. Later, patrons at upscale stores who didn’t want to carry cash would have their purchases recorded in a ledger book at some stores, but that became problematic as urbanization and larger stores meant that recognizing customers and trusting them to pay wasn’t quite as a reliable method as it used to be. “They very often have to finance agricultural operations by borrowing money for seed and other things to keep them going until harvest.” “It’s characteristic of agrarian societies,” says Lewis Mandell, financial economist and author of The Credit Card Industry: A History. An early clue comes from 1888, when Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, 2000-1887, a novel about a time traveler exploring a utopian future, and imagined using a “credit card.” (It was a utopian future, so fairness ruled the day and “credit corresponding to his share of the annual product of the nation is given to every citizen on the public books at the beginning of each year.”) Bellamy’s idea, however, worked to a large extent like a debit card does today-not like what we know today as a credit card.īut the concept of consumer credit is even older than that.