>I use my credit card but always pay my balance in full every month. That gives me the small satisfaction of screwing THEM out of a few dollars a month because on a larger purchase I will wait until it is too late for them to get it on my next statement, giving me an extra month of using their money.

Neat trick. Reminds me of the good old days of the eighties back home when your account was debited when the checks arrive from the merchant - and if you kept tabs on how lazy the merchants were, you could keep bying gasoline at those pumps where they took weeks. Few years later, the bank changed the policy, and debited your account as of the date on the check (while still paying the merchant as of the date the check cleared), so the bank was basically using my money for a while as its own.

>Credit for people (let's exclude the home mortgage) is not such a good thing for the individual, especially when the rate is well beyond typical bank loan rates.

A loan shark with nice makeup is still a loan shark.

>It's 'good' for business in this way... people with large outstanding balances (the huge percentage of whom take it very seriously) lose virtually any flexibility in their day-to-day life but most specifically in their work. Their (credit)obligations mean they NEED their job badly, so they find themselves conceding things like loss of benefits and longer hours and performing questionable procedures ('I would have said something but I need my job') and on and on.

As someone said back then back there, "čovek bez stana je čovek bez stava" (a man without a home is a man without an attitude); the difference between the guy who has to pay a rent and the rest and the guy who only has to pay power and heating was pretty much 5:1 in monthly costs, and provided for the same flexibility. Guess who was much easier to manipulate.

>The "beauty" of the system is that good marketing has ensured that people (the users) DEMAND credit cards and accept the high rates. People just gotta have that bauble today and it's gotta be that expensive one they saw on TV or in the magazine.

I thought the Joneses were summarily shot long ago, so nobody would have to keep up with them. Seems to be there's a new generation at large.