Barclaycard - "The New Kind of Money"...

Finding this advertisement for Barclaycard in a 1967 Readers Digest rather surprised me as the concept of "plastic money" had no real effect on me or my family until the mid-1980s.

It is worth taking a copy of the ad and enlarging it so that you can read the inset letter which contains such gems as:

Alright, you've been swamping me, for almost a year, with this fancy propaganda about how you 'make shopping simpler'.

So it would seem that the card had been around for almost a year by April 1967.

WOW!

I was born in 1965, so don't remember 1967, but as a working class kid in the 1970s, I knew nobody who had a credit or debit card. In fact, round where I lived, not many people had bank accounts!

Every week, my step father would bring home his pay packet (he was paid in cash), put it on the kitchen table, and he and my mother would work out the finances for the week.

We knew about credit cards, they were advertised, but as a kid I never thought that I would have one. There was "Them" (those that did have them) and "Us" (those that did not have them) and the gulf seemed unbridgeable.

When I began work in the early 1980s, I, like my step father, was paid in cash and the whole of the office where I worked looked forward to Thursday when the pay packets were brought round.

Some years later, I changed employers and my new boss paid salaries directly into bank accounts. It was then that I opened an account and first met plastic money via a debit card.

I was considered very advanced and adventurous by most of my family.

And this was in the 1980s.

The 1960s were certainly ahead of their times on occasion!