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Credit Card Trivia
In the beginning, credit cards were just charge accounts, offered by individual stores and only usable at those stores. The first credit card that could be used at multiple locations was offered by The Diner's Club in 1950.
American Express started off as a shipping company in 1850, shipping products across the United States and capitalizing on the limited reach and slow speed of the United States Postal Service. They began selling money orders and traveler's checks in 1882 and issued its first credit card in 1958.
Visa was originally called BankAmericard, a card offered by Bank of America in 1958 in California. By 1970, they had created an association, called the National BankAmericard, Inc., of all the US Banks that issued the BankAmericard. It wasn't renamed to Visa until 1976.
Discover Card was introduced by Sears in 1985 and gained notoriety because it charged no annual fee. At the time, Sears also owned the brokerage Dean Witter Reynolds Organization and the Discover brand was integrated into that organization. When Dean Witter merged with Morgan
Stanley in 1997, Discover went along for the ride.
The Visa logo colors were chosen because the blue represented the sky and the gold represented color of the hills in California where Bank of America was founded.
In 1984, American Express billed their Platinum Card as extremely exclusive and it had an annual fee of $250 ($484.84 in 2006 dollars). Today, the extremely exclusive card for American Express is their black Centurion card
with a $2,500 annual fee! (and requirement to spend $250,000 a year).
One million tons of oil is equivalent to about 13,000,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity.
The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.
~ Frank Hubbard
