5.
“As a broke college student, I couldn’t get a credit card, and I got a monthly check, so things got tight during the month (this was in the early ’70s before debit cards)…”
“To help me out, my older brother taught me this: Sears would issue a store credit card to college students. I used it to purchase a gift certificate for, say, $40. I would then use the gift certificate to buy a couple of pairs of socks, and then they gave me the rest in change. $30-35 went a long way back then. At the end of the month, I would pay the bill, then rinse and repeat.
I kept (and used) my Sears card for many, many years.”
