Aaah, that one time when the card providers weren't shitcoin-peddling/loyalty scams (#1598123, #1598593)

The credit card supposedly began with a forgotten wallet. In 1949, New York businessman Frank McNamara was horrified to discover that he had left his at home and had to summon his irate wife to help pay for a business lunch at Major’s Cabin Grill, a landmark Manhattan restaurant. Humiliated, McNamara resolved to create a way to pay without cash. By 1950 he had organised a network of restaurants where members could charge meals to one card and pay their tab at the end of the month, which he called Diners Club.

This is just efficient, clearing transactions with one major payment instead of many small ones. (But inefficient in that parties need to use credit to put themselves over.)

"This wasn’t entirely new. Single-business charge cards and store accounts had been around for decades,"

...and of course "credit"/store credit is how most societies used "money" in most commercial places (and outside the big cities) until very recently.

Despite the ensuing chaos, this experiment helped spread the wider use of credit cards. The rest, as they say, is history. There’s now $1.26tn worth of credit card debt outstanding in the US alone. And it all came from a forgotten wallet. Except it didn't

False story?

The true story seems to have originated a bit closer to home. Matty Simmons — a former Diners Club vice-president and later the CEO of National Lampoon — later claimed in his 1995 memoir that he and McNamara had made up the ‘forgotten wallet’ story as a PR stunt.
To finally get to bottom of this story, Alphaville tracked down the great-granddaughter of ‘Major’ Compson Satz, the restaurant owner of Major’s Cabin Grill. Major’s wasn’t just the restaurant where McNamara claimed to have forgotten his wallet, it was also the first business to sign up to the Diners Club scheme.

Whoever invented it, we can say pretty definitively that there was no forgotten wallet, no humiliating restaurant meal. The origin story is a myth. But perhaps that doesn’t matter.

archive misbehaving, but it's Alphaville so should be open regardless.