Dan lived his life in arrears. One month in arrears to be precise. He realised that his credit card company gave him free credit if he paid his bill in full at the end of the month. So at some stage he went out and spent two months worth of income in one month and had Visa look after half of it.
The only problem with this strategy was that as soon as he cleared his bill each month he was stone broke and had to put everything on his credit card again. He was a kind of a proto-type for what the Celtic Tiger was later to become. But when I met him back in 1996, we thought of him simply as a reckless idiot.
That wouldn’t have mattered except I tended to find myself behind him in the lunch queue each day and would watch my Lasagne grow cold as he waited on the barman to process his three pounds fifty payment. Back then, they used the manual carbon paper swipe contraption that never seemed to work first time and required dexterity and nimble fingers not often found in the bar industry.
Dan’s crowning achievement was to purchase a Cadbury’s Crème egg on credit one lunchtime which cost the princely sum of nineteen pence. I had the misfortune to stand behind him in the queue that day too.
I work for the bank that invented the credit card and still makes the majority of its profits in these fiscally challenged times from the poor credit management of card holders. And yet, I will publically state that I hate the things. History has not been kind to me I must admit. I applied for my first Visa card as a fresh faced twenty two year old, fresh off the immigrant boat to England and determined to make my way in the bustling metropolis that was Thatcher’s Britain. My bank sent me a glossy brochure promising all sorts of benefits if I would deign to accept one of their flexible friends. I duly completed the application form and submitted it for approval.
Two weeks later, I received a rejection letter. Despite my high salary and dashing good looks, I didn’t meet their approval criteria. I was devastated, mainly because I didn’t even want the bloody thing in the first place and had only applied because they wrote to me. I saw it as a cunning English plot to humiliate a humble Irishman and I wasn’t going to stand for it. I called the bank and demanded to speak to the manager. As anyone who has tried to do this will know, banks go to extraordinary lengths to avoid letting you speak to their manager. But I was determined, not least because I was calling from work and was therefore using their phone and time. I held on for an hour before I was eventually put through.
“Hello, is that the Manager?” I asked with as much indignation as I could muster.
“Yes, Mr. Borrow here, how can I help you?”
I was momentarily taken aback. “You’re a bank manager called Mr. Borrow?”
“Yes, it gets a few chuckles alright” he said. “You might say I had a calling to this profession. It was either that or become a librarian.”
I laughed and my indignation was lost. I found it hard to muster the fury of my original assault and meekly accepted his offer to ‘look into things’.
Not long after my conversation with Mr Borrow, I received a shiny little card in the post and was welcomed with open arms to the world of personal debt and consumerism. I have to admit that I found the card useful at times, especially in Luxembourg where they would let you buy beer at service stations on your company credit card and mark it up as petrol.
The advent of the Internet led me into a whole new world of spending, as it allowed me to buy things without the hazard of dealing with obnoxious sales people. On the internet, you buy things on your own time (actually in most cases you buy things on your employer’s time, but the less said about this the better). It’s a different matter when you are racing for the tram and anxious to buy a ticket in 7-eleven and some gobshite is buying the paper on his credit card and struggling to remember his Pin number.
New Zealand has a lot to answer for in this respect. I arrived there for the first time in December 1995 and was brought out for a beer by my gracious host on a quiet midweek night in Auckland. There were only two of us in the pub and three staff, but it still took us ten minutes to get served. Tony my host had ordered two bottles of DB bitter that came to the princely sum of 4 of those funny kiwi dollars. He then handed over a battered card that looked like it had been through a few washing machine cycles. I later learned that this was an “EFTPOS” card, a devise that New Zealanders seem bizarrely proud of. It is basically a debit card that has proved so successful that kiwis no longer carry cash, except to buy drugs and pay for hookers, although I’m led to believe that the major players in both these businesses are happy to accept plastic.
Tony spent a few minutes scraping his card along the machine slit without success. He withdrew the card, blew on it, cleaned it against his shirt and retried. After further failure, the barman muttered a phrase normally reserved for the end of relationships. “It’s not you, it’s me”. He proceeded to blow into his machine (a large exhalation of human breath seems to be the preferred repair protocol for EFTPOS related problems) and to bang it aggressively against the bar.
Eventually I stepped forward with a fresh five dollar note and the transaction was closed in seconds.
So I’d like to make a suggestion that might annoy my bosses. Ban card transactions of less than $100 if somebody is standing behind you in a queue. It will speed things up and increase trade. And that my friends, is the only suggestion I’ll give to help Capitalism work its way out of the mess it finds itself in.
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