Borrow by Louis Hyman

Author:Louis Hyman [Hyman, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-74490-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

BRINGING GOOD

THINGS TO LIFE

(1970–1985)

As credit cards began to enter society in new places, The Wall Street Journal followed their emergence. Many stories focused on people who should not have had cards. The systems in place to keep cards among the well-to-do sometimes didn’t work. A Pittsburgh grocery clerk in 1965, for instance, on receiving a card through a background check error, flouted his card to a reporter, declaring “How about this? Just like the rich people.”1 Credit cards connoted class—and classiness. With cards, you could live the life you always wanted. The ultimate story of this sort happened in 1959, just as travel and entertainment (T&E) cards were about to begin to lose their ground to the bank cards. The adventures of a $73-a-week clerk from the Lower East Side named Joseph Miraglia illustrated both the limits and the possibilities of credit cards. In one month of orgiastic spending he ran up a $10,000 bill while entertaining himself across three countries, four girlfriends, and one rhinestone-collared cocker spaniel.

It all began in September 1959, when Joe happened to duck into a fancy New York restaurant and spied a pile of travel and entertainment card applications for “men of responsibility.” He filled out Hilton Hotels’ Carte Blanche application—complete with his real salary—and to his surprise received a card a few weeks later with a letter that told him “this card is your key to every luxury Hilton has to offer.” Indeed it was. Beginning with the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, Miraglia hit Montreal, Las Vegas, and Havana before running out of steam. He bought fur coats, fine wines, dogs, meals, suits, and even silk shirts from the same tailor as Cary Grant. With only the cash he won at the craps tables and some checks he wrote against the card, he lived, as he said, “like a millionaire’s son.”2 When the police caught up with him, he simply said, “I always wanted to see the world, and I like nice things.”3

Although Joe could live the high life on his Carte Blanche card, he couldn’t live a normal life. A traveling businessman with a Carte Blanche could eat in a few swanky restaurants, buy his wife or mistress a fur coat in an affiliated shop, maybe even get a suit from a neighborhood tailor who had a relationship with the hotel, but he couldn’t go to Kmart. He couldn’t buy groceries. Only places that catered to the expense account crowd took American Express, and for everything else there was cash. Yet while Joe could spend $10,000 to live like a millionaire, it would have been nearly impossible for him to spend $10,000 to live like a middle-class person—much less a working-class guy from a Lower East Side tenement.

The way we use credit cards today—to pay for groceries, fast food, and coffee—was heralded as futuristic in the 1960s—a hallmark of a wondrous cashless world of tomorrow! It would be a distributed landscape of credit where cards would replace cash. One of the reasons this

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.