Business World: Cards Leave an Imprint and Consumers Are Indebted
Correction</br></br>James Smith, although active in earlier efforts at Sears to develop a credit card, left the company prior to the introduction of the Discover card and didn't oversee its rollout. This information was misstated in Tuesday's Business World column.</br></br>(Aug. 24, 1990)</br></br>The 1980s were a bull market in consumer plastic -- credit, charge, debit and automated-teller cards -- that changed the way Americans bank and spend. They brought convenience that is one of the rather invisible gains in quality of life enjoyed by most of us in a period that is too casually written off as a gilded era.</br></br>Some equate plastic with phony, contending in this case that expenditures-made-easy represent a false prosperity for which we must soon pay dearly. Doubtless, some recklessness in consumer finance was part of the debt pollution that now is being cleaned up. But those voices on the political periphery calling for restrictions on credit cards as part of a return to solvency have it wrong. The fact that banks, now the predominant card issuers, are generally pushing these loans while they tighten up in other sectors is evidence these purchase plates grease the economy but do not bloat it.