Cash or Credit?

Under the register at the little grocery store there was a card file with names on the cards.

"Cash or credit?" had a whole different meaning.

I remember walking over to the store with my friend after a volleyball game but before the football game. We had not lived in Brownlee for long at that time, but I was still surprised that everyone knew me. In Denver I was annonymous - just another kid. In Thedford I was "the Brownlee teachers' kid." More than likely, the adults knew my name even.

I paid cash for my snack that night, but my friend put her snack on her parent's "credit card," meaning that the store clerk pulled the right index card out without even asking her name, and wrote down the date and the amount that she spent. Then my friend signed next to the amount. At the end of the month her parents would get a bill from the grocery store which they would pay and the index card balance would zero out. (I would note that my friend was the child of a land-owning ranch family and I was the child of teachers, and we were no doubt treated better than the hired man's child - the caste system is alive and well in the Sandhills of Nebraska.)

I thought about that store and the little index cards this morning when I heard a story on the radio about a gas station in Chicago that uses fingerprints to charge expenses. It's the same idea - knowing without a doubt who someone is and knowing that they have good credit - just a little less personal.