Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

It is interesting how financial transactions have changed over the decades.

Mary and I got married back in 1967. I got drafted five months later and by the fall of 1968 I was in Germany. Mary joined me around the start of 1969.

There were no credit cards there. Not even for gas. Everything was cash. We rented an off post apartment and the rent was due in German marks. So each month I took about $100 in U.S. dollars to a German bank and traded it for 400 marks since my rent was payable in German marks. Each month my rent ended up being slightly different because the exchange rates between the dollar and mark changed daily. Sometimes it took as much as $105 to get 400 marks.

When we got home credit cards were either non-existent or so new we didn’t have any other than for gas, so all this new stuff is really different. We were used to a cash or check society.

Somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s along came Visa and Mastercard with their cards that were good at most merchants.

The idea at the time was that a merchant didn’t have to worry about having so much cash for change and didn’t have to worry about counter checks or people’s checks bouncing. For that they paid a percentage of the transaction as a fee to the credit card company.

The credit card company would send cardholders a bill every month that they would pay usually with a check.

Some of you may remember counter checks. Each merchant had blank checks for area banks. If you didn’t have cash or your checkbook with you (or didn’t have a charge account with the merchant) the merchant would hand you a counter check blank from whatever bank you requested. You’d fill it out and the merchant would send it to his bank which would then send it to the customer’s bank. They were on counters here in Glenwood still in the early 1970s.

Things have changed.

One change has been that various merchants have started having their own credit cards so they avoid sending so much to Visa and Mastercard.

Now all those companies don’t want to sit around and wait for a check in the mail, they want us to send them money electronically. (Apparently they don’t want bounced checks either).

That means you have to set up an account with the credit card company and give it authorization to withdraw money from your account when you approve an amount, usually the minimum payment or larger amount. Of course setting up an account means an account name and password. I do not like setting up accounts and passwords.

I do not like setting up accounts and passwords. I do not like setting up accounts and passwords…

Now in the day when a person only needed one credit card for everything that probably would not be a big deal. Now with most major retailers having their own cards a person could have a half dozen or more cards for which to set up accounts.

So instead of having a wallet full of cash to pay for things a person has a wallet full of plastic cards to pay for things. Is that really progress?

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Speaking of buying things and paying for them I kind of like the self-checkouts. I know people make a joke out of them for making the customer do all the work and there are some really funny jokes out there about that process.

Most of my shopping is going into a store to get one or two things (so I’m obviously not the grocery shopper in the house). I find being able to check out quickly is a nice service.