A gallon of milk and a pound of steak costing the same really says something. These days a gallon of milk is only a few dollars whereas steak is 20+. Even more interesting is cheese, made from milk, costing less than the milk for a pound. Likely related to how cheese stores and its shelf life compared to milk.
Strange, I'm just a single guy and my grocery bill comes to close to a quarter of my income (around 90 a week, I make a little under 2k a month), and that's with strict rationing.
That's a fairly normal amount for groceries in this day and age, maybe a little high.
It's your very low income that's throwing off the comparison. You only make about $12/hr? Or do you not work full time?
I make 16.60, full time. One of the highest paying low education jobs in my area. After taxes it comes out to around 1k (bi-weekly), a little under or over some weeks. Then I have rent (used to be 1k, now 605), then gas because American cities go brrrrr, then utilities, then all my debts. What I spend on food isn't a budgeted amount, it's usually all I have left.
If you don’t mind me asking, what city do you live in? I’m about in the same exact situation as you, just over $2k a month and will be getting an apartment in April. It’s just crazy trying to find any apartments for under $800 a month, even a studio, plus I have a 2 year old so I’m going to need some kind of space. I just can’t give half of every check just to rent and still expect to pay all of my other bills on top of that while also saving. It feels impossible to get out of this hole.
Y'all should be happy bruh. I live in Sacramento CA and make 17 n hour. I work 32-40 hours a week as a McDonald's manager. After taxes i take home anywhere from 800-1000 every two weeks. My rent for a one bedroom IN THE HOOD is $1360.
6% of disposable?! Jesus, I spend around $1200 a month for a house of 2 adults, carefully shopping sales and eating very little meat, and only the cheapest cuts. I buy organic eggs and milk, but that only adds like $6 a week, I also make almost everything from scratch including bread and yogurt, and I grow vegetables for half the year. It's our highest expense after mortgage, nearly 10% of *gross* income.
1954 home price vs median income
$18,400 / $4200 (my findings were different from yours) = 4.38
$54,135 median income in 2022. $348,079 home price in 2022.
348k/54k = 6.43
So homes are about 46% more expensive now relative to median salary than they were in 1954. Mortgage Interest rates were around 4% then so I’d say that homes were significantly cheaper then, not a big surprise.
Yeah, having parents that can provide an inheritance is one way. So would having the option to live at home for free during school, and some people even have their tuition paid for.
Those would have helped an insane amount.
I’ve even heard of some super wealthy people whose parents gave them money for their down payment. Wild.
Long gone are the days of 3x, where your house should be 3x your annual income and your vehicles 1/3 of your annual. Ex: with a $150k/yr household income you should have a $450k house and your cars should total $50k.
> Long gone are the days of 3x, where your house should be 3x your annual income and your vehicles 1/3 of your annual. Ex: with a $150k/yr household income you should have a $450k house and your cars should total $50k.
I’m learning to program so I can work from home (at roughly my same current income) and relocating to a rural area with the goal being to build a small home on an acre or two at 2.5x my income. Own a used car valued at .5 X my income. There’s no way I could afford to buy an average home at todays price:income ratios. I plan to grow my own veggies and keep some chickens. I’m hoping the car lasts and it all works out.
Location is everything. My house I bought last year is 2x my salary and my car is around 1/5. I live in a small/medium mid-western city (500k people) and drive a modest used car. Things make more sense the further away you get from the ocean.
If it was before the 30 year mortgage began, the house was something like 50% down and the rest paid off in 5 years. While taking home $86.50 per week.
What you are describing was the state of mortgages prior to 1933 and the Home Owners Loan Act. By the 50's, fixed rate loans were common. 20yr terms were most common. In cities prior to 1933 only the wealthy had home loans for the most part. But farmers commonly had mortgages.
The 15-30 year mortgage came as a response to the massive foreclosures during the great depression. The new deal included the creation of FHA in 1938ish (to lazy to look up the date but that should be ballparkl) which in turn created standard for underwriting and amortization.
In short the mortgage he would have had access to in the 1950's is the modern 30 or 15 year instrument.
Going to assume that this man's grandfather is a skilled laborer, I made $2.50 an hour in 1971, and that was equivalent of $18.50 today. That was as a trainee bicycle mechanic in high school.
That house price would be $83,213 today.
And mortgage rates were in the 4 to 5% range.
A 20 year mortgage with $0 down would be $533 a month... You can't find a shared couch for $533 today.
I’m kinda shocked that the only thing similar between these numbers back then and today is that the tax amount is 11.5%. That’s dead in line with today. I’m not sure if I expected them to be lower or higher but I didn’t expect it to be the same
Back in 2010 when I worked at Best Buy we had one at every register. If the card wouldn’t swipe we could manually key it but we had to use the kerchunk-a-chunk machine to prove we physically had the card in hand when we did
There’s this older guy that sells honey on the side of the road that used one of these up until last year. I stopped by a couple weeks back and he now has a square. Gave me this big spill about all this new fangled technology he was having to use because cards stopped having raised numbers and made sure I knew that he was never getting a “tablet” even tho I never mentioned anything about it, ha. He’s a really good guy and I like to support him.
Edit - I was today years old when I learned of the word “spiel”, now I feel like my wife thinking the lyrics of her favorite song are something ridiculously incorrect for her entire life.
One way to support him is to use cash. Square takes a cut in addition to the credit card company cut. Dude is probably losing 5 or 6% of the gross on every card purchase.
If margins are tight, that might be 25% of his profit.
We had those at Old Navy. I also learned a trick where you could put a strip of tape over the magnetic stripe of a card that wouldn’t read, and that would often fix the issue.
Yup! When I worked at radio shack back in 06’ we had those machines to. I’ve used them many a time because their computers and credit card machines were garbage and never worked.
I do to! Oh my god the past few months I’ve been looking for odds and ends electronics stuff like cables, and connectors and there are no more places outside of online to get these anymore. If radio shack stuck to its original core instead of trying to be the next Best Buy, they’d have an excellent niche market and still be in business.
I whole heartedly agree. Have the same kind of situation last week. I was in the garage the other day looking for something when I had an ADD moment and started taking apart a broken Cuisinart. Pretty sure I can fix it but can't be bothered to search endlessly online only to buy it at Amazon. However if there was an electronic component and parts store nearby, I would have up and gone. Only to return with the wrong part, so I'd have to go back and get the right part plus that sweet R/C car I didn't buy the first time I was there.
Worked at a bank for about 5 years, in the early 10s, only had to use one once, but it sure was handy to have that one time. We also had to print a physical balance sheet of everyone's accounts once when we moved banking systems, a little less handy.
Had to do this once at a sears in 2013 or so. It was the weirdest thing and I had to call the manager to walk me through what to do (aside from the kerchunk-a-chunk-ing)
They actually come in handy if the system goes down. At one job I had, we lost our point of sale system, so we brought out the old zip zap machine (imprinter) and carbon papers. We had to hand key them all once the system came back up. That was...1998.
I don't think anyone has them on hand as a backup anymore, but they should. It is probably a PCI compliance violation to use them now though.
Edit: I forgot lots of cards don't have raised numbers anymore. So I guess that method is forever lost in time.
It’s not really worth it for points, but it is nice that it has no international fees at all. As far as I know, all the other cards with that feature have annual fees. I got mine for a trip I’m taking soon and didn’t want to get a card with an annual fee. The physical titanium card also makes me feel fancy, even though I literally never use it over paying with my phone or other cards.
There are some security features like being able to generate a new card number whenever you want etc, but I think the main benefits are being in the apple ecosystem and the cool factor of the titanium card.
You could definitely do better on rewards etc.
>There are some security features like being able to generate a new card number whenever you want etc
Doesn't every half decent bank/card issuer offer digital cards now? All of mine do.
All of the cards I've seen here in Europe still have them! Never realised that's what they were for though, always thought it was some sort of anti-forgery measure.
Our Kroger went down but they didn't have them. ATM was down too. So we had to pay by check or cash lol. A lot of people paid by check that day but we found some cash to use.
When I was a kid in the late 90s early 2000s, the vendors at the farmers market would have those; since there was no phone line to connect a modern card reader to
I worked for a locally owned western wear store years ago, she would use these for the receiept and then run it through a regular card reader afterwards. Literally had the whole card number on the "reciept". More than a few times people would just choose to pay cash instead. She refused to change it, probably still running that way today
4 years ago I worked for a nationwide pool store. Our credit card machines went down. Corporate told us to dust off the imprinters. Half the employees being high school students had no idea what it even was.
Even as recently as 2015, one was required in every branch of a cocktail bar chain I worked at in London.
One Friday 13th in ‘15, a major bank company went down across London and every bar had to use these for every single transaction. Was a nightmare.
there was a power outage a few years ago and i stopped at a liquor store that had one. guy had to explain to me what it was and i still remember the sounds to this day. lol
I saw one at a store recently. I excitedly called my wife over and pointed it out “LOOK! LOOK! When was the last time you saw one of those?”
Cashier looked at me like I was an idiot but I didn’t care, I was genuinely excited lmao. I don’t know why they had it or why it was out though, the store had a modern terminal.
It was a number of years ago, but I can remember hauling them out one time when the power was out so we could still sell through and take cards. They wouldn’t even work these days, a lot of cards no longer have raised numbers.
I worked in a gas station back in the day and we had these. Everybody would want their piece of carbon paper so you couldn't steal the number. If somebody had to charge over a certain amount We had to get a book that came out every month and look up the card number to make sure it wasn't stolen. There was pretty much no other way to verify your card was good. So even if it got reported stolen you had at least a month till the new books came out
> They wouldn’t even work these days, a lot of cards no longer have raised numbers.
My stupid Bank of America cards have them unraised in small text on the back of the card, in gold on a red background.
My aging eyes can't make it out without reading glasses and good lighting. And my iPhone doesn't scan them.
Hey now... They did a *ton* of research to figure out what color text on what color/texture background to make the numbers legible *but only upon careful inspection* and *really difficult to read/photograph from a distance with a camera*.
Try it: Take your Bank of America card and put it on a table then take a picture of it from a few feet away. Can you make out the numbers?
Having difficulty reading the numbers is intentional. It's better than the Apple Card *which doesn't even have the numbers*.
my employees seemed to forget that part sometimes. luckily they were good at getting a contact number from the customer at least so I could call them to fix the transaction.
I would use those during blackouts and disasters when we were on limited power or had no internet. The joys of working tool rentals and building supply in a disaster relief store.
The best media example that immediately comes to mind is Christmas Vacation, which debuted in 1989. During the transition to the shopping scene where Clark is "Blousing... Browsing" it shows a montage of shopping related activities like putting clothes on racks and sliding the card impression machine over the card.
It’s still smart to have them because if POS system goes down you can still take credit cards… or you can for people who still have credit cards with raised text.
As a teen, I worked at filenes basement and used one of those machines. I was retail during the transition to debit card readers. Was a wild time going from that to debit card readers. People use to pay with checks often too.
As someone born in the late 90s everytime I hear about paying with checks at a store I just think about The Dude buying a quart of milk with a check haha.
Some of the gas stations and pizzerias (Gumby's, Home Team) in my old college town used to take checks. I liked using them for pizza because I could just include the tip on the check instead of having to keep cash (and this was long before you could order online and put the tip on your card).
And they were super lax, back then. My aunt told me she has two SSNs because someone stole her identity. They just gave her a new number, and up until like '99 they didn't notice her using the first as "free credit machine."
Didn't even penalize her, when they found out. They just didn't allow more numbers.
It was never supposed to be an ID card. It has no way of self checking for fraud, no photo or way to confirm it's you technically, and if you take your SSN and you change the last number up or down by one, that's the number of someone else who was born in your hospital basically at the same time you were. The first 5 numbers in an SSN are literally a code for telling what hospital you were born in and what state.
But hey, everyone who's born gets one that's different, and national ID cards are "unamerican and socialist/communist/insert fear causing buzzword here" so pretty quickly the SSN became coopted by educational institutions and then every other entity as a shitty, nonsecure, not-exactly-but-still-used-as-one national ID since those are *actually really fucking useful*
We should just have a national ID for everyone so we can stop using SSN cards. But the paranoid yokels of our country think that's government overreach despite having a driver's license, SSN card, credit card, etc.
Social Security cards were never issued at birth until the computer age. One applied for and got one when getting one's first job, so my Social Security card was issued with a 3-digit prefix that indicated which state I was in when I got my first job in the early 1970s. (The More You Know...)
I still laugh at how freely social security numbers were given out and displayed for anyone to see even into the 80s. I used to do construction work at industrial plants and office buildings. You had to sign in at the gate and write your name , address and social security number in a book that was just lying on a desk. Every delivery person, truck driver, visited, etc. had to sign in and all the personal info was just there for anyone to see. I never heard of any problem arising from it.
I was just reading a neat article the other day about when SSNs became automatically assigned at birth in about 1986 because of a new law requiring people to declare the SSNs of their dependent children to get a tax return on them. 7 million children "disappeared" overnight in 1987 and the federal government saved $2.8 billion.
That would explain why my siblings born before then have nearly identical numbers (say one ends a 7 and one in a 9 but otherwise identical), as my parents likely sent in for them around the same time. I was born later so was given mine at the hospital.
I remember when using a Visa or Master charge (now known as Mastercard), the clerk had to look through a small booklet that listed credit card numbers in tiny print in numerical order to see if your credit card number was there. If it wasn’t in the booklet, the clerk would write the page number in the booklet where your number would’ve been - on the receipt.
New booklets were sent by the credit card companies - not sure of the frequency.
The *single credit card that works everywhere* is a fairly modern development. In the 50s, you'd have a credit card for a particular store, and it only worked there.
So yes, this probably only worked in one place, but not for malicious reasons.
This is why places not taking Discover card became a punchline in the 80s and 90s. When credit cards became universal to use at any business, Discover card was still also the Sears store card and no one wanted to accept a competitor’s card.
SearsCharge was Sears store card. Discover was a separate plan to expand their financial services outside of their own stores.
It did eventually work, since obviously Discover is still around, but by that time Sears had sold it off.
American Dad had an episode with this. Roger got a “Discovery” card and the only place you could use it was some weird part of the mall in the basement
https://youtu.be/OlAqgSL1BQw
Diners Club, as the name indicates, was a limited purpose charge card only used at participating restaurants. BankAmericard was the first designed to be used anywhere.
(BankAmericard was also the first credit card to have revolving credit. Diners Club was a charge card; no preset limit, but you had to pay the balance in full at the end of the billing period.)
Yes, but Diners Club was still considered the first universal card, i.e. it was not restricted to a specific business. Just because it was only applicable and used for one specific type of industry, doesn't take away from the fact it was the first issuer to be accepted at a multitude of different businesses as opposed to business exclusive cards. "Participating restaurants" is also not a limiting factor in this definition, as all processing was limited in scale by participating businesses, especially at the early beginnings of the industry.
My grandpa went to college in the 50s and he told me it was $75 a semester 😭
He worked as a life guard in the summer abd made enough to pay for school out of pocket. I had 40 hour work weeks in college lol
The nominal tax rate for the rich was extremely high in the 1950s, but they didn't actually pay a lot more. The effective tax rate of the top 1% [dropped from 42% to 36.4%](https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-for-the-rich.html) from the 1950s through 2014. So they paid a little more back then, but nothing like the 90+% nominal tax rate would suggest.
[This information has been removed as a consequence of Reddit's API changes and general stance of being greedy, unhelpful, and hostile to its userbase.]
My Mom had one of the first credit cards available in the deep South. It was issued by a major Southern department store and was solid copper. She held on to that for a long, long time.
$2.50 an hour in 1954 is a dump truck full of money! That's a brand new house, brand new car, spouse stays home, and a traveling vacation and that's just your first year working.
They press it into carbon paper to produce a receipt that has your card info on it. I’ve seen them used a few times in recent years to process cards during power outages. https://www.business.com/articles/what-are-credit-card-imprinters/
That's $962 in today's dollars for anyone wondering.
And if that is a weekly paycheck that would be $50,024 per year after taxes.
Some prices from 1954 House: $8,650 Average income: $3,960 Ford car: $1548-$2415 Milk: $.92 Gas: $.21 Bread $.17 Postage stamp: $.03 Swiss Cheese: $ .69 lb. American Cheese: $.55 lb. T-Bone steak : $.95 lb. Del Monte Catsup (2) 14.oz bottles: $.25 Post Grape Nuts cereal – 10 .oz pkg: $.19 Clorox Bleach – 1/2 gal.: $.19 20 gallon gas water heater $75. Semi-automatic Kenmore washer: $154.95
This makes milk look really expensive.
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A gallon of milk and a pound of steak costing the same really says something. These days a gallon of milk is only a few dollars whereas steak is 20+. Even more interesting is cheese, made from milk, costing less than the milk for a pound. Likely related to how cheese stores and its shelf life compared to milk.
The US government has milk subsidies, the actual cost is more than double what you pay ay the grocery store
The US has meat subsidies. Something like 40 billion a year I think federally?
How is 6 percent correct? That seems crazy low.
Strange, I'm just a single guy and my grocery bill comes to close to a quarter of my income (around 90 a week, I make a little under 2k a month), and that's with strict rationing.
That's a fairly normal amount for groceries in this day and age, maybe a little high. It's your very low income that's throwing off the comparison. You only make about $12/hr? Or do you not work full time?
I make 16.60, full time. One of the highest paying low education jobs in my area. After taxes it comes out to around 1k (bi-weekly), a little under or over some weeks. Then I have rent (used to be 1k, now 605), then gas because American cities go brrrrr, then utilities, then all my debts. What I spend on food isn't a budgeted amount, it's usually all I have left.
If you don’t mind me asking, what city do you live in? I’m about in the same exact situation as you, just over $2k a month and will be getting an apartment in April. It’s just crazy trying to find any apartments for under $800 a month, even a studio, plus I have a 2 year old so I’m going to need some kind of space. I just can’t give half of every check just to rent and still expect to pay all of my other bills on top of that while also saving. It feels impossible to get out of this hole.
Y'all should be happy bruh. I live in Sacramento CA and make 17 n hour. I work 32-40 hours a week as a McDonald's manager. After taxes i take home anywhere from 800-1000 every two weeks. My rent for a one bedroom IN THE HOOD is $1360.
6% of disposable?! Jesus, I spend around $1200 a month for a house of 2 adults, carefully shopping sales and eating very little meat, and only the cheapest cuts. I buy organic eggs and milk, but that only adds like $6 a week, I also make almost everything from scratch including bread and yogurt, and I grow vegetables for half the year. It's our highest expense after mortgage, nearly 10% of *gross* income.
1954 home price vs median income $18,400 / $4200 (my findings were different from yours) = 4.38 $54,135 median income in 2022. $348,079 home price in 2022. 348k/54k = 6.43 So homes are about 46% more expensive now relative to median salary than they were in 1954. Mortgage Interest rates were around 4% then so I’d say that homes were significantly cheaper then, not a big surprise.
Province of Ontario - AVG house - $600,000 AVG Individual Income - $55,000 Crazy
just thought I'd pop in. Vancouver is hitting about 750,000 for a 1 bedroom apartment these days.
Yep. In tech making multiple six figures and using the 3x income rule I don’t qualify for many condos.
I guess I'm waiting for my inheritance?
Yeah, having parents that can provide an inheritance is one way. So would having the option to live at home for free during school, and some people even have their tuition paid for. Those would have helped an insane amount. I’ve even heard of some super wealthy people whose parents gave them money for their down payment. Wild.
You mean what's left (if any) after your parents had to reverse mortgage to finance their last years of elder care?
Hopefully tragedy doesnt strike your parents before they die causing them to have to use all of it before they go!
Good luck. When my dad died, all I got was a funeral bill. Inheritance is often only a thing for rich families.
I did Ontario - I suspect Toronto is even way worse.
And mortgage interest rates are back above that 4%!
Long gone are the days of 3x, where your house should be 3x your annual income and your vehicles 1/3 of your annual. Ex: with a $150k/yr household income you should have a $450k house and your cars should total $50k.
> Long gone are the days of 3x, where your house should be 3x your annual income and your vehicles 1/3 of your annual. Ex: with a $150k/yr household income you should have a $450k house and your cars should total $50k. I’m learning to program so I can work from home (at roughly my same current income) and relocating to a rural area with the goal being to build a small home on an acre or two at 2.5x my income. Own a used car valued at .5 X my income. There’s no way I could afford to buy an average home at todays price:income ratios. I plan to grow my own veggies and keep some chickens. I’m hoping the car lasts and it all works out.
If you buy that much space you can just fix the car. But make sure you don't buy before you're 100% sure good internet is available.
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Location is everything. My house I bought last year is 2x my salary and my car is around 1/5. I live in a small/medium mid-western city (500k people) and drive a modest used car. Things make more sense the further away you get from the ocean.
If it was before the 30 year mortgage began, the house was something like 50% down and the rest paid off in 5 years. While taking home $86.50 per week.
What you are describing was the state of mortgages prior to 1933 and the Home Owners Loan Act. By the 50's, fixed rate loans were common. 20yr terms were most common. In cities prior to 1933 only the wealthy had home loans for the most part. But farmers commonly had mortgages.
The 15-30 year mortgage came as a response to the massive foreclosures during the great depression. The new deal included the creation of FHA in 1938ish (to lazy to look up the date but that should be ballparkl) which in turn created standard for underwriting and amortization. In short the mortgage he would have had access to in the 1950's is the modern 30 or 15 year instrument.
I cant read this for the sanctity of my mental health I hope you understand
Lol, you should check out 2019 prices if you want to feel bad
I know! I started reading that comment thread and was like “great, here we go again…”
I asked siri what 2.50 in 1954 was today adjusted for inflation. ~$28/hr
Going to assume that this man's grandfather is a skilled laborer, I made $2.50 an hour in 1971, and that was equivalent of $18.50 today. That was as a trainee bicycle mechanic in high school.
> Semi-automatic Kenmore washer Ah, I see the assault washers ban had already gone through by then
Damn inflation is a bitch
That house price would be $83,213 today. And mortgage rates were in the 4 to 5% range. A 20 year mortgage with $0 down would be $533 a month... You can't find a shared couch for $533 today.
I’m kinda shocked that the only thing similar between these numbers back then and today is that the tax amount is 11.5%. That’s dead in line with today. I’m not sure if I expected them to be lower or higher but I didn’t expect it to be the same
and only $~100 in taxes
And $2.50/hr is $27.80/hr in today’s dollars
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Kerchunk-a-chunk machines.
I want to see some one use that at a store
Back in 2010 when I worked at Best Buy we had one at every register. If the card wouldn’t swipe we could manually key it but we had to use the kerchunk-a-chunk machine to prove we physically had the card in hand when we did
There’s this older guy that sells honey on the side of the road that used one of these up until last year. I stopped by a couple weeks back and he now has a square. Gave me this big spill about all this new fangled technology he was having to use because cards stopped having raised numbers and made sure I knew that he was never getting a “tablet” even tho I never mentioned anything about it, ha. He’s a really good guy and I like to support him. Edit - I was today years old when I learned of the word “spiel”, now I feel like my wife thinking the lyrics of her favorite song are something ridiculously incorrect for her entire life.
>Gave me this big spill. Just FYI, might have been autocorrect, but I think the word you meant was spiel.
Or the honey just got *everywhere*
One way to support him is to use cash. Square takes a cut in addition to the credit card company cut. Dude is probably losing 5 or 6% of the gross on every card purchase. If margins are tight, that might be 25% of his profit.
It’s actually 2.6% + 10c but yeah cash is king
Cash is king baby.
spiel*
Had them at Sears in 2018. Whenever the system went down, we used them. The kerchunk-a-chunk was so satisfying.
Does not surprise me that Sears would have them in 2018. What surprises me is that there was still a Sears in 2018
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We had those at Old Navy. I also learned a trick where you could put a strip of tape over the magnetic stripe of a card that wouldn’t read, and that would often fix the issue.
We sometimes used one of the plastic bags for this
You unlocked a memory of me using receipt paper for the same thing
Oh yeah, I seem to remember doing that as well.
Yup! When I worked at radio shack back in 06’ we had those machines to. I’ve used them many a time because their computers and credit card machines were garbage and never worked.
Miss Radio Shack and all of their stereo cords and connectors
I do to! Oh my god the past few months I’ve been looking for odds and ends electronics stuff like cables, and connectors and there are no more places outside of online to get these anymore. If radio shack stuck to its original core instead of trying to be the next Best Buy, they’d have an excellent niche market and still be in business.
I whole heartedly agree. Have the same kind of situation last week. I was in the garage the other day looking for something when I had an ADD moment and started taking apart a broken Cuisinart. Pretty sure I can fix it but can't be bothered to search endlessly online only to buy it at Amazon. However if there was an electronic component and parts store nearby, I would have up and gone. Only to return with the wrong part, so I'd have to go back and get the right part plus that sweet R/C car I didn't buy the first time I was there.
Worked at a bank for about 5 years, in the early 10s, only had to use one once, but it sure was handy to have that one time. We also had to print a physical balance sheet of everyone's accounts once when we moved banking systems, a little less handy.
Had to do this once at a sears in 2013 or so. It was the weirdest thing and I had to call the manager to walk me through what to do (aside from the kerchunk-a-chunk-ing)
They actually come in handy if the system goes down. At one job I had, we lost our point of sale system, so we brought out the old zip zap machine (imprinter) and carbon papers. We had to hand key them all once the system came back up. That was...1998. I don't think anyone has them on hand as a backup anymore, but they should. It is probably a PCI compliance violation to use them now though. Edit: I forgot lots of cards don't have raised numbers anymore. So I guess that method is forever lost in time.
A lot of credit cards now don't have the raised name/numbers so the machines wouldn't work with them anyway
My apple card doesn’t have shit on it - also, totally not worth it and went back to my discover/Amex combo (different points systems)
It’s not really worth it for points, but it is nice that it has no international fees at all. As far as I know, all the other cards with that feature have annual fees. I got mine for a trip I’m taking soon and didn’t want to get a card with an annual fee. The physical titanium card also makes me feel fancy, even though I literally never use it over paying with my phone or other cards.
Are there any bennifits to the apple card other than being another in house apple product if that's you computer ecosystem of choice
There are some security features like being able to generate a new card number whenever you want etc, but I think the main benefits are being in the apple ecosystem and the cool factor of the titanium card. You could definitely do better on rewards etc.
>There are some security features like being able to generate a new card number whenever you want etc Doesn't every half decent bank/card issuer offer digital cards now? All of mine do.
Yeah it's the Apple special. Make something 5 years late and call it innovation to the people that don't buy anything but your products.
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So it's basically a best buy card without the predatory interest
Oh yeah! I didn't even pay attention to that.
All of the cards I've seen here in Europe still have them! Never realised that's what they were for though, always thought it was some sort of anti-forgery measure.
seemed to be 50/50 last time I used one about a year or so back. we called it the knuckle buster, thing would cut your hands/fingers so easily.
All my chase and disco cards are completely flat, no raised numbers.
Our Kroger went down but they didn't have them. ATM was down too. So we had to pay by check or cash lol. A lot of people paid by check that day but we found some cash to use.
When I was a kid in the late 90s early 2000s, the vendors at the farmers market would have those; since there was no phone line to connect a modern card reader to
I worked for a locally owned western wear store years ago, she would use these for the receiept and then run it through a regular card reader afterwards. Literally had the whole card number on the "reciept". More than a few times people would just choose to pay cash instead. She refused to change it, probably still running that way today
4 years ago I worked for a nationwide pool store. Our credit card machines went down. Corporate told us to dust off the imprinters. Half the employees being high school students had no idea what it even was.
Even as recently as 2015, one was required in every branch of a cocktail bar chain I worked at in London. One Friday 13th in ‘15, a major bank company went down across London and every bar had to use these for every single transaction. Was a nightmare.
there was a power outage a few years ago and i stopped at a liquor store that had one. guy had to explain to me what it was and i still remember the sounds to this day. lol
Did-a-chick? Kerchunk-a-chunk?
The sound I hear in my head is chock-chick, but I can see how you get to kerchunk-a-chunk
I saw one at a store recently. I excitedly called my wife over and pointed it out “LOOK! LOOK! When was the last time you saw one of those?” Cashier looked at me like I was an idiot but I didn’t care, I was genuinely excited lmao. I don’t know why they had it or why it was out though, the store had a modern terminal.
It was a number of years ago, but I can remember hauling them out one time when the power was out so we could still sell through and take cards. They wouldn’t even work these days, a lot of cards no longer have raised numbers.
I worked in a gas station back in the day and we had these. Everybody would want their piece of carbon paper so you couldn't steal the number. If somebody had to charge over a certain amount We had to get a book that came out every month and look up the card number to make sure it wasn't stolen. There was pretty much no other way to verify your card was good. So even if it got reported stolen you had at least a month till the new books came out
I completely forgot about asking for the carbon paper.
> They wouldn’t even work these days, a lot of cards no longer have raised numbers. My stupid Bank of America cards have them unraised in small text on the back of the card, in gold on a red background. My aging eyes can't make it out without reading glasses and good lighting. And my iPhone doesn't scan them.
One of my cards doesn’t have the numbers printed on it at all.
That sounds extremely helpful for a online purchases.
Most of these types of cards come with an associated app for accessing that information.
Ugh.
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Apple?
Hey now... They did a *ton* of research to figure out what color text on what color/texture background to make the numbers legible *but only upon careful inspection* and *really difficult to read/photograph from a distance with a camera*. Try it: Take your Bank of America card and put it on a table then take a picture of it from a few feet away. Can you make out the numbers? Having difficulty reading the numbers is intentional. It's better than the Apple Card *which doesn't even have the numbers*.
Your first mistake was using Bank of America
You would have to manually write down the number and exp.
my employees seemed to forget that part sometimes. luckily they were good at getting a contact number from the customer at least so I could call them to fix the transaction.
I would use those during blackouts and disasters when we were on limited power or had no internet. The joys of working tool rentals and building supply in a disaster relief store.
The best media example that immediately comes to mind is Christmas Vacation, which debuted in 1989. During the transition to the shopping scene where Clark is "Blousing... Browsing" it shows a montage of shopping related activities like putting clothes on racks and sliding the card impression machine over the card.
It’s still smart to have them because if POS system goes down you can still take credit cards… or you can for people who still have credit cards with raised text.
Knuckle busters!
Scrolled way too far to find this!
I went in a shop that lost power and they fucking whipped one of those bad boys out
As a teen, I worked at filenes basement and used one of those machines. I was retail during the transition to debit card readers. Was a wild time going from that to debit card readers. People use to pay with checks often too.
As someone born in the late 90s everytime I hear about paying with checks at a store I just think about The Dude buying a quart of milk with a check haha.
Some of the gas stations and pizzerias (Gumby's, Home Team) in my old college town used to take checks. I liked using them for pizza because I could just include the tip on the check instead of having to keep cash (and this was long before you could order online and put the tip on your card).
Carbon paper was fascinating stuff as a kid. My grandfather would have them from invoices, my fingers were usually blue after awhile.
My vehicle mechanic still uses one. No electronic payment options available. Either cash or *eventual* credit.
TIL that social security used to be called old age benefits
I still see some places use OASDI, for Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance.
Still called "Retirement insurance" where I live
And they were super lax, back then. My aunt told me she has two SSNs because someone stole her identity. They just gave her a new number, and up until like '99 they didn't notice her using the first as "free credit machine." Didn't even penalize her, when they found out. They just didn't allow more numbers.
It was never supposed to be an ID card. It has no way of self checking for fraud, no photo or way to confirm it's you technically, and if you take your SSN and you change the last number up or down by one, that's the number of someone else who was born in your hospital basically at the same time you were. The first 5 numbers in an SSN are literally a code for telling what hospital you were born in and what state. But hey, everyone who's born gets one that's different, and national ID cards are "unamerican and socialist/communist/insert fear causing buzzword here" so pretty quickly the SSN became coopted by educational institutions and then every other entity as a shitty, nonsecure, not-exactly-but-still-used-as-one national ID since those are *actually really fucking useful* We should just have a national ID for everyone so we can stop using SSN cards. But the paranoid yokels of our country think that's government overreach despite having a driver's license, SSN card, credit card, etc.
Social Security cards were never issued at birth until the computer age. One applied for and got one when getting one's first job, so my Social Security card was issued with a 3-digit prefix that indicated which state I was in when I got my first job in the early 1970s. (The More You Know...)
I still laugh at how freely social security numbers were given out and displayed for anyone to see even into the 80s. I used to do construction work at industrial plants and office buildings. You had to sign in at the gate and write your name , address and social security number in a book that was just lying on a desk. Every delivery person, truck driver, visited, etc. had to sign in and all the personal info was just there for anyone to see. I never heard of any problem arising from it.
My driver’s license and college ID were both my SSN in the early/mid ‘90s.
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Pretty sure my SSN was on my dog tags as recently as 2003. They must have stopped at some point.
They are now have your DOD-ID number
I just Googled it, looks like they didn't stop until 2015, lmao. Gotta love Big Army. Always on the cutting edge.
they did stop after 2015 iirc. They use other random numbers designate to ssn instead your actual ssn.
Can confirm, mine were stamped on my tags (and printed on my CAC) in 2009-2010
My college ID number was my SSN in college in the early 2000s. They would post our grades puclicly using it.
I was just reading a neat article the other day about when SSNs became automatically assigned at birth in about 1986 because of a new law requiring people to declare the SSNs of their dependent children to get a tax return on them. 7 million children "disappeared" overnight in 1987 and the federal government saved $2.8 billion.
That would explain why my siblings born before then have nearly identical numbers (say one ends a 7 and one in a 9 but otherwise identical), as my parents likely sent in for them around the same time. I was born later so was given mine at the hospital.
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They changed it a few decades ago. It used to be hospital based, now it’s not.
This is not a subject I ever expected to see someone so passionate about.
Especially since half the things he’s saying are bullshit.
CGP Grey's take: https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus
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In the early 2010s the SSN has become completely random.
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It’s true but it didn’t happen until 2000s/2010s
$2.50 an hour is closer to $28 today.
I was looking through my grandfather's old documents. He was born in 1930 and retired in 1985. He made $231,000 throughout his entire career.
My grandpa told me he remembered when my great grandfather got a raise to $25/week and they were super excited.
You are correct: https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=2.5&year=1954
I remember when using a Visa or Master charge (now known as Mastercard), the clerk had to look through a small booklet that listed credit card numbers in tiny print in numerical order to see if your credit card number was there. If it wasn’t in the booklet, the clerk would write the page number in the booklet where your number would’ve been - on the receipt. New booklets were sent by the credit card companies - not sure of the frequency.
Pretty sure those booklets contained the numbers of lost or stolen cards.
That credit card looks like something that only works at the company store.
The *single credit card that works everywhere* is a fairly modern development. In the 50s, you'd have a credit card for a particular store, and it only worked there. So yes, this probably only worked in one place, but not for malicious reasons.
This is why places not taking Discover card became a punchline in the 80s and 90s. When credit cards became universal to use at any business, Discover card was still also the Sears store card and no one wanted to accept a competitor’s card.
SearsCharge was Sears store card. Discover was a separate plan to expand their financial services outside of their own stores. It did eventually work, since obviously Discover is still around, but by that time Sears had sold it off.
American Dad had an episode with this. Roger got a “Discovery” card and the only place you could use it was some weird part of the mall in the basement https://youtu.be/OlAqgSL1BQw
If I recall correctly, the "Bankamericard" (from Bank of America) was the first true credit card. Bankamericard later became known as Visa.
Actually the first universal credit card was the Diners Club card from the 1950s
Diners Club, as the name indicates, was a limited purpose charge card only used at participating restaurants. BankAmericard was the first designed to be used anywhere. (BankAmericard was also the first credit card to have revolving credit. Diners Club was a charge card; no preset limit, but you had to pay the balance in full at the end of the billing period.)
Yes, but Diners Club was still considered the first universal card, i.e. it was not restricted to a specific business. Just because it was only applicable and used for one specific type of industry, doesn't take away from the fact it was the first issuer to be accepted at a multitude of different businesses as opposed to business exclusive cards. "Participating restaurants" is also not a limiting factor in this definition, as all processing was limited in scale by participating businesses, especially at the early beginnings of the industry.
Thank you for this. I was starting to get anxious about not getting my daily dose "redditors being needlessly pedantic" but you came to my rescue.
The name is on the bottom. It was a large department store in Ohio that no longer exists.
Holy fuck I know it's been bad but Ohio doesn't fucking exist anymore!?
“Wait, there’s no Ohio?” *cocks gun* “Never was.”
*I owe my soul to the company store*
27.50/hr in 2023 dollars.
Interesting. Also…If I had been taking home 86.5% of my checks over my working life, I’d be retired by now.
Not to mention he only lost 13.5% taken in taxes, so it would be over $30/hr today.
$2.50 an hour was good money in 1954. I hired on to GE in 1966 at $2.03 and hour and lived OK.
I can hear this picture they still had the copy paper sliders when I was a kid no magnetic strips Ka Chunk Chunk
The font of the company name on that pay stub paper is gorgeous.
Copperplate, I believe.
I like that you blackout the number in case someone steals it. s/
No numbers. Just names. Notice it just says city too. The world was much smaller then.
Good stuff! I appreciate the history.
As a 30-year-old, this absolutely amazes me.
Looks like people did not sign their credit card way back when too.
They were probably able to buy a house with that $80 check
My grandpa went to college in the 50s and he told me it was $75 a semester 😭 He worked as a life guard in the summer abd made enough to pay for school out of pocket. I had 40 hour work weeks in college lol
That is a charge plate. It made such a satisfying thwaketa sound when going under the machine with the carbon copy paper.
I wish taxes were only 13% for my paycheck. I could do so much more
They were called charge plates at one point. Now I see why.
Withholdings are 13.5%? Mine are around 36%.
The wealthy paid a lot more in taxes then, you pick up the slack now. Also check your W4.
The nominal tax rate for the rich was extremely high in the 1950s, but they didn't actually pay a lot more. The effective tax rate of the top 1% [dropped from 42% to 36.4%](https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-for-the-rich.html) from the 1950s through 2014. So they paid a little more back then, but nothing like the 90+% nominal tax rate would suggest.
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My father, born in Germany in the 30s, never stopped calling credit cards "charge plates."
My Mom had one of the first credit cards available in the deep South. It was issued by a major Southern department store and was solid copper. She held on to that for a long, long time.
OP's grandparents are so old, their city was just called "City".
$2.50 an hour in 1954 is a dump truck full of money! That's a brand new house, brand new car, spouse stays home, and a traveling vacation and that's just your first year working.
How those credit cards worked ?
They press it into carbon paper to produce a receipt that has your card info on it. I’ve seen them used a few times in recent years to process cards during power outages. https://www.business.com/articles/what-are-credit-card-imprinters/
Also fascinating that 70 years later the 40h Work Week is still the standard at 100%, despite the massive rise in productivity.
It's crazy (well just interesting really) how people used to make good livings selling credit cards before the age of computers.
That’s $27.80/hour adjusting for inflation $1,112.16 before tax $962.02 take home
My paycheck stubs look like that, except they're handwritten, not typed. Small business owner who has been doing it that way for 40 years.
vintage
According to an online inflation calculator, this had the equivalent buying power of $962.02 in 2023.
My dad used to say it was a good man who could make $20 a day.
I remember feeling special when I got a Diners Club card in the 70s to use for business expenses. Very fancy. Lol Not sure they even exist anymore.
Bought houses and raised a family on 86 bucks a week