I know for a fact that buying things “on account” (ie having an account with a business and paying the bill you’d racked up at predetermined times) was a common practice during the 19th century, and I feel like I’ve heard that the ancient Romans even had a concept of what we’d now call buying on credit
it absolutely existed earlier in the 20th century, too- the line “buying on credit is so nice” appears in the musical West Side Story, at least in the movie version from 1961
I think credit cards can get out of hand easily, and to some degree the modern system might be called a scam. but the concept of buying on credit did NOT start in 1989
You’re correct that credit in some form has existed essentially since human commerce became a thing. (Not always in the form of a plastic card of course.) I think that what the OP meant is that credit scores (in terms of a nation-wide database) are new. In the US, national credit scores as we know them didn’t arise until the FICO was created in 1989. (Rudimentary forms of credit score databases–which were much less pervasive and only really used by individual banks and creditors–do go back to the 1950′s.) Wide utilization of these credit scores for lending, renting, employment etc., didn’t really start until the late 1990′s and early 2000′s–and yet they’ve been widely accepted as a cornerstone of your economic standing.
