Credit Card History
Beginnings of Consumer Credit
1890s: Express Travelers Checks introduced
1914: Retailer-issued credit cards
1920s
Service stations,
department stores and
hotel chains began
offering credit accounts
to customers
Late 1930s:
Wanamakers introduces
revolving credit
Credit card originally
a tool to bind
customers to specific
retailers –
Not a profit-making
operation
Idea of store-specific
credit began to seem
too constraining
This led to the
development of the
universal credit card
1950s Sears credit card
transaction
Credit and the Postwar
Consumers Republic
After World War II, Americans began to
obtain more discretionary income
Increased consumer purchasing opened
the door to increasing availability of
credit
Consumer credit grew from $5.7 billion in
1945 to $375 billion in 1980
1949: Diners Club
In 1949, Diners Club issued its first card--made of
cardboard--for use in 27 restaurants in New York City.
By 1951, nearly 20,000 Americans carried it in their
wallet.
1958: American Express and
Bank Americard
Bank cards
proliferated in
the 1960s
Economies of
scale led to the
prevalence of
Master Charge
and Bank
Americard (late
VISA)
Development of large
client base was crucial
to success in the
industry
Aggressive marketing
led to problems:
Unsolicited cards,
theft, fraud etc.
Computerization spurred a boom in the 1970s and '80s, as
did new methods of analyzing consumer data to unearth the
most lucrative "revolvers," those who often carry high
balances but are unlikely to default.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,18935
07,00.html#ixzz2PgN6E3aV
Legal Issues
Equal access, privacy, lost or stolen cards,
billing errors
Led to government intervention
1974: Federal Privacy Act
1975: Equal Credit Opportunity Act
1978: Financial Institutions Regulatory and
Interest Rate Control Act
Market Saturation
New marketing angles:
Affinity credit cards
Secured credit cards
Prestige credit cards, etc.
Discover Card Commercial,
1986 Super Bowl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3NMMNnrzUc
James Twitchell, “Two Cheers
for Materialism”
[H]uman beings love things. In fact, to a considerable degree
we live for things. In all cultures we buy things, steal things,
exchange things, and horde things. . .
. . . In the West, we have even developed the elaborate
algebra of commercial law to decide how things are
exchanged, divested, and recaptured. Remember, we call
these things "goods," as in "goods and services." We don't . . .
call them "bads." This sounds simplistic, but it is crucial to
understanding the powerful allure of materialism.
If you want to understand the potency of American
consumer culture, ask any group of teenagers what
democracy means to them. You will hear an extraordinary
response. Democracy is the right to buy anything you want.
Freedom's just another word for lots of things to buy.
What do you think of Twitchell’s argument?
Most consumption, whether it be of entertainment or in the
grocery store, is active. We are engaged. Here is how I watch
television. I almost never turn the set on to see a particular
show. I am near the machine and think I'll see what's
happening. I know all the channels; any eight-year-old does. I
am not a passive viewer. I use the remote control to pass
through various programs, not searching for a final
destination but making up a shopping basket, as it were, of
entertainment.
Twitchell on Lifestyle
Rather than lives, individuals since midcentury have
had lifestyles. For better or worse, lifestyles are secular
religions, coherent patterns of valued things. Your lifestyle is
not related to what you do for a living but to what you buy.
One of the chief aims of the way we live now is the
enjoyment of affiliating with those who share the same
clusters of objects as we do.
Twitchell writes,
[W]e no longer understand social class as well as we do lifestyle, or
what marketing firms call "consumption communities." Observing
stuff is the way we understand each other. Even if no one knows
exactly how much money it takes to be a yuppie, or how young you
have to be, or how upwardly aspiring, everybody knows where
yuppies gather, how they dress, what they play, what they drive,
what they eat, and why they hate to be called yuppies.
In a similar vein, Fiske writes,
In late capitalist societies blue-collar workers can earn as much, if
not more, than white- or pink-collar workers, so style and taste
displace economics as markers of class identity and difference.
John Fiske
Shopping malls are open invitations to trickery and tenacity.
Agree? Disagree?
Shopping is the crisis of consumerism: it is where the art and
tricks of the weak can inflict the most damage on, and exert
the most power over, the strategic interests of the powerful.
The shopping mall that is seen as the terrain of guerrilla
warfare looks quite different from the one constructed by the
metaphor of religion. (12)
80 percent of unemployed people visited the mall at least
once a week, and nearly 100 percent of young unemployed
women were regular visitors.
Class and consumption
It would seem that self-display is, for
those denied social power, a
performance of their ability to be
different, of their power to construct
their meanings from the resources of
the system. It has within it elements
of defiance and of pride in self- and
sub-cultural identities, and it is
pleasurable insofar as it is a means
of controlling social relations and
one’s cultural environment. (23)
Fiske writes,
Commodities are not just objects of economic exchange;
they are goods to think with, goods to speak with. (25)
This recalls Twitchell:
[M]ost of the "work" of consumption occurs after the act of
purchase. Things do not come complete; they are forever
being assembled.
In the practices of consumption the commodity system is
exposed to the power of the consumer, for the power of the
system is not just top-down, or center-outward, but always
two-way, always a flux of conflicting powers and resistances.
(25)
According to Thomas Frank, John Fiske exemplifies
“cultural studies’ celebration of difference, transgression, and
the carnivalesque.” Frank finds this approach
troubling. (See Conquest of Cool, pp. 17-18). Having
read ”Shopping for Pleasure,” do find Fiske’s “celebration of
difference, transgression, and the carnivalesque” among users
of shopping malls persuasive or unpersuasive?