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A Brief History of the Credit Card - JSTOR Daily

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For now-ubiquitous consumer credit cards, bad early results had a hidden benefit.

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. It’s holiday shopping season—time for making lists, tying bows, and swiping credit cards. In a 2000 paper for Enterprise & Society, Timothy Wolters explains how the ubiquitous plastic rectangle came to be . As consumer culture blossomed in the first half of the twentieth century, installment plans and other ways of making retail purchases on credit became increasingly popular. But these kinds of credit were offered through the retailers themselves, and the point was to encourage shopping, not to make a profit on the credit. Wolter

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