It’s fascinating to hop into a time machine and look back at how credit cars were viewed a few decades ago. Paul O’Neil wrote A Little Gift from Your Friendly Banker for the March 27, 1970 issue of Life:
American banks have mailed more than 100 million credit cards to unsuspecting citizens of the Republic during the last four years, and have offered each recipient not only a handful of “instant cash” but a dreamy method of buying by signature after the lettuce runs out. One should not conclude that bankers no longer consider money a sacred commodity. They do. They do. But the soberest of trust institutions now suggest that we forget those strictures on thrift with which they belabored us so vigorously in the past and “live better” by refusing to “settle for second best.” This means that our friendly banker hopes we will run up credit-card bills we cannot pay off in 25 days and will allow him to charge us EIGHTEEN percent a year on the resultant debt. It does not mean that he trusts us. He will put us on the “hot list” in a flash if we go broke in the process or try to support mistresses at his expense.We tend to be such 1) slippery, 2) careless or 3) compulsively extravagant louts that bankers have always viewed our attempts to wheedle loans from them with vast suspicion, and have kept the notes by which such transactions are solemnized locked up in fortress-like vaults. The credit-card concept has led them to something very like mailing off hundred-dollar bills to every Tom, Dick and Harry in town, with accompanying notes pledging the receiver to act like a good chap and pay it all back later. They have gamely stifled an instinctive sense of horror in so doing because the cards also present them with an irresistible opportunity for new commercial accounts and the quick, vastly profitable development of widespread consumer credit.