Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Credit cards can put you in a Box

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Jan. 12, 1999 | 11:06 a.m.

I hope no one is watching. There's one guy in line behind me and several within hearing range, but I doubt they're paying attention. Still, should my moment of shame arrive as expected, I don't want any witnesses.

After all, could anything be more humiliating than having your credit rejected by Jack in the Box?

Yes, I have now slapped plastic on the counter of a fast-food franchise; these days, along with gassing my truck on credit, buying groceries on credit and playing slots on credit, I can have the previously unimaginable experience of paying 22 percent interest on a Monster Taco Combo. Local Jack in the Boxes have been accepting cards on a trial basis "since August," according to Eric Shellhorn, spokesman for parent company Foodmaker Inc. And -- whew! -- my application has just been approved. It was a smooth, painless procedure; no scarlet letter of fiscal shame for me.

In a nation that has enshrined convenience as a moral attribute, plastic power is insidiously seductive. "Credit/debit transactions are growing steadily," Shellhorn says. "What we're finding is that folks like the system" for its ease. That's the seductive part. "And they tend to spend a little more with credit cards than when they pay with cash." There's the insidious.

Our nation is indisputably a house of cards. Phone cards! Value cards! You can put your doctor visits or your taxes on plastic. Want to buy books or browse porn on the Internet? Have that credit card handy (or so I hear). You almost literally can't leave home without one -- try reserving a cubicle at Motel 6 or an econobox from Avis otherwise.

Convenience is fine -- when you order that groovy "Sounds of the '70s" collection from TV you naturally don't want to wait a millennium for your check to clear before you can cue up Starland Vocal Band.

But what's being lost, I think, is a sense of money as tangible stuff. When you hand over your Visa to the credit counselor at Jack in the Box, it doesn't seem as though you're parting with actual cash. There may be a vague sense of transaction, but it feels disengaged from your finances. The removal of money from your account seems like an act that happens some other time, very far away and only slightly involves you. It's easier than ever to go days or weeks riding your credit card like a magic carpet through convenience stores and fast-food joints, picking up little things here and there. The risks of that are obvious. They tend to spend a little more with credit cards than when they pay with cash ...

You don't need a bankruptcy attorney to tell you what happens next. "They get overextended," says the receptionist for bankruptcy attorney Janice Smith. Indeed. America's unpaid credit card debt is estimated at $44 billion, only about half of it mine, and more people now file for bankruptcy than graduate from college.

Even relatively benign prepaid cards -- phone cards, for instance, or the card-like bookstore gift certificates I received for Christmas -- condition us for the more casual use of the real thing.

I suppose cash will soon be a quaint, slightly embarrassing anachronism. Aw, Dad, don't use money -- what if someone sees us? Still, paper money at least forces you into the morally edifying position of making tough choices: Five bucks -- do I eat lunch or rent "Armageddon"? We shouldn't always be able to have it both ways.