Credit cards and obesity

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, how Americans pay for economic transactions has changed considerably. Cash payments have been replaced by card payments. Consumers and merchants have embraced relatively painless forms of payments such as credit and debit cards. The average American today carries four or five plastic cards in their wallet to pay for their everyday transactions. In contrast, in the 1960s and 1970s most people paid for their purchases in cash. As banks, retail merchants and finance companies flooded the market with plastic cards of different color and design, people gladly switched from cash to cards because card payments obviated the hassles associated with cash payments: they no longer had to visit the banks or ATMs and stand in long queues to collect cash for their daily transactions; they did not have to worry about the possibility of running out of cash in a grocery store; and even if they finished all the cash in their bank account, credit card companies smilingly offered them money on credit. Never in the history of economic transactions has making a payment been as easy as it has been in the last three decades.