When I started work the majority of people were paid weekly and in cash and that was on Thursdays - you got a tiny little wage slip that told you your pay, tax and national insurance. Some places also showed you your hours and overtime worked. Those pay slips were about the same width as around 4 or 5 lines of A4 paper.
Companies pushed staff into direct paid accounts, but banks were always closed earlier than most factories and were also closed on Saturdays, so you had to open a Bulding Society/Friendly Society account, the Post Office also ran accounts. This meant you could get you pay out in a Saturday morning or perhaps on the one late day opening some of them had during the week - a late day opening was until 6pm.
If you were working on Saturday - such as maintainance people like me did then it was common practice to start work at 6 am and nip off to the Building Society for half an hour to collect your pay.
None of us had credit cards and I think it was just a matter of not having bank accounts. Just about all credit cards were operated by banks, about the only one I can think of that wasn’t was American Express and Diners Club - no-one I know ever had those.
ATMs, no such thing - cash at the counter or in your pay packet, that was it. It made saving up a lot harder for larger household items such as brown or white goods, and there;s a couple of terms you don’t hear that much either.
The first ATMs - when they first started you could only go to your own bank, but not every branch had one so you kept a little fold out laminated card about your person, that card listed all the ATMs in the country that you could use - for my home town this meant there were 4 in the entire city of around 500k.
It took years before every branch pretty much had its own ATM, and years after that for them to be linked and you could go to the majority of ATMs to get cash.
Paying for your groceries at the supermarket with your debit card was fun - it would be rung up and the till issued a carbon copy printout that had to be put into a roller press thing that would take up the card details from the embossed numbers and press them on to the carbon copy form - a slow process when you were in the checkout queue.It was common to withdraw cash from the supermarket till in this way - oh, akmost forgot, you had to sign the carbon copy receipt too and they would chaeck it against the signature on your card, sometimes they would also ask for I.d such as driving licence.
How about being given the third dgree when you applied for a mortgage - you’d make an appointment with some person in the bank, you’d have to bring along loads of those stupid tiny little pay slips, copines of bank statements, a years worth of utility bills - you often had to prove you had been a customer of the bank for a number of years - even though the bank already knew that inforation anyway, and also you had to have personal referees to show you were trustworthy person - and you could not just pick anyone as a referee - it had to be a ‘respected’ proffession such as your GP, local village policeman, former headmaster, employer or some academicly licensed proffesional such as an architect - oh you could also get a military person of officer level as well, or a local Magistrate.
After all that and after you had proved that actually you probably didn’t need a mortgage at all - you could probably save it up, you might - just might be told that you had been approved and now you were in a waiting list to get the money - that approval for a mortgage only lasted a few months and if you were waiting longer than the approval time you could end up haing to go through the whole process again.
Sometimes I wonder how anyone every bought anything that required more than a weeks wages - except on hire purchase.
“Will that be cash … or Chargex? Da-da-dum-dum.”