Costs and competition in bank credit cards
Last year consumers said "Charge it"
with Visa or MasterCard 76 times every second,
4,500 times every minute, and nearly
275,000 times every hour of every day. Credit
cards, especially bank cards, are being used
more frequently both as a method of payment
and as a way of taking on consumer debt.
There are more than three times as many purchases
made with a bank card today than there
were ten years ago, and the number of transactions
per account is up from 18 per year in
1975 to 23 per year in 1985. Over 2 million
merchants accept MasterCard, Visa, or both
and about 3,000 institutions issue the cards.
