I seem to remember back in 1998-2000, when i was 8-10 years old, there was a promotion going on where children could get their hands on a Coca-Cola credit card, to teach them about properly using a CC or something like that.
I remember wanting one, and seem to even recall a friend (who i lost touch with years and years ago) had one.
Nobody i bring this up to has any idea what i am talking about. Did this actually happen, or am i making up memories?
I remember a lot of talk about credit cards for younger and younger people as far back as the 80s as the cashless society emerged. I assume it was marketing promotion to convince parents to allow their kids to have their own cards because no one is going to give credit to a minor without some adult also responsible for paying it back.
When my sister was a teenager in the late 1980s, some of her friends had their own credit cards, so this is mostly how I know about it. Some companies were really pushing them for underage customers, and that didn’t last very long because the default rate was so high.
I remember there being prepaid or capped-credit cards for minors which were designed to be accepted as regular Visa/whatever cards and looked pretty nearly the same as a regular payment card - this was quite a long time ago - before the widespread adoption of debit cards, I think.
I’m struggling to find any documentation on the topic though
In the UK we have things like this: https://www.gohenry.co.uk/
A prepaid Visa card that the parents can top up, available to people as young as 6. They had a big tv campaign a few years ago that led to a lot of pestering from my children, but I haven’t seen an advert for a few years. I thought they had vanished, but google proved me wrong.
At £3 a month they can go do one.
My kids had this and here was also a Mastercard version. By the time I got them for my kids , debit cards were getting popular but it wasn’t so easy at that time to find a bank that would give a 13 yr old a debit card.
Try this.
I seem to remember the offer of a children’s CC, not much more then that. My parents made me a authorized user of their CC, which I was responsible with. I also had a debit card from my bank but debit cards were not visa/mc, but had their own exchanged such as Cirrus and NYCE (New York Cash Exchange), and IIRC with very few exceptions allowed ATM withdrawals only, and those ATM’s were either your bank or ‘in network’. I do seem to recall some stores set up for those networks for transactions, but very few. Some banks had a preferred network and a for fee other network (I had one NYCE was free Cirrus was a charge, perhaps $3).
The bank seemed to have no problem with me having my own account and also giving me a debit card, actually several banks as I switched accounts a few times. This actually amazed my parents, and I was using a debit card way before they got one.
Was it this?
Not just the kids. Shortly after the Discover card was launched I saw a comedian, whose name escapes me, with a routine something like this:
Discover card, heh, there’s an appropriate name. See, I got one of those a while back and after three months I Discovered I’d run up $8,000! Then the bank Discovered, I can’t pay for all that stuff and I Discovered they don’t like that. So now the bank’s tryin’ to Discover where I’m livin’ at.
I’m guessing you’re my age or older. In the days before Visa/MC debit cards, when they were really ATM cards, it wasn’t difficult for someone to under 18 to get a card for their own account. But at some point, things changed. When my kids were teenagers , I couldn’t find a bank that would give an under 18 year-old a debit card. A lot of banks wouldn’t even let an under 18 year old open up their own savings account- they could open up a joint account with a parent. I don’t know if laws changed or if it was bank policies that changed, but I was able to open my own savings account when I was about 12.
From wikipedia:
Visa Buxx is a prepaid card available in the United States and intended for use by teenagers. The program was Visa’s first prepaid card product and was launched in 2001. Visa Buxx is not a credit card; instead, it debits a prepaid account
We were at a mall when my older kids were preteen. Pepsi was there in a kiosk giving the Pepsi challenge. If you pick correctly (pepsi) you got a Pepsi credit card. It had something like $5 on it. You could use it the first card accepting vending machines. There were none of these in our area, so they never got used. I do remember thinking Coke should do that.
OTOH, my son (as a 13yo) inherited a chunk of change from his great grandfather (namesake). We bought him a certificate of Deposit. For tax reasons it was put in his name. He received many c.c.offers in the mail. Many had cards in them with huge credit limits, all we would have to do was activate them. Well that didn’t happen. That boy couldn’t be trusted with his lunch money, let alone a credit availability.
That sounds more like a gift card, than anything else. It certainly wasn’t a credit card.
Yea, I knew it wasn’t a credit card. But it was card given out by a beverage company. I thought maybe the OP saw a Coca-Cola one and assumed it was a c.c. Or debit card.
That’s all.
They’ve got to make money somehow. They’re not earning interest on a prepaid card.
Seems to me this is the most likely explanation. Although it seems like more of a reward card than anything else
I’d imagine they are, I doubt they just sit on the money that’s prepaid rather than investing it. Which isn’t to say the fee isn’t justified, as they’re likely to be keeping the money for a lot less time than a bank would.
I do know that standard credit card companies love getting college students to sign up for a card: On the one hand, a lot of college students are likely to use it irresponsibly, and run up large debts that they pay interest on. But on the other hand, they’re not likely to go completely deadbeat, as eventually their parents will bail them out.