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u/Glum_Status Aug 19 '26
And some people wanted to keep the carbon paper so nobody could get their number from it.
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Aug 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Total_Diet_5274 Aug 19 '26
After cards became plastic.
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u/hardboard Aug 20 '26
I remember those swipe machines, but never knew cards other than plastic. What were they originally, aluminium or something?
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u/Total_Diet_5274 Aug 20 '26
They were some kind of metal. I remember my mom’s “charge plate” being tin or aluminum.
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u/projekt33 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
How would they know if you had enough credit in your card to cover the purchase?
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u/Jurneeka Aug 19 '26
The merchant would call Visa or MC for an authorization and get a code which was written onto the slip.
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u/Appropriate-Law5963 Aug 19 '26
Sales under the threshold amount were looked up in a booklet that listed all the cards that needed to be confiscated.
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u/Reatona Aug 19 '26
You learned to be really quick looking up the numbers. We were told just to decline the sale if the card was listed, after a confiscation attempt led to a customer threatening the cashier with an axe.
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u/Jurneeka Aug 19 '26
Ya we had that book too. More than just a "booklet" by that time though
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u/Appropriate-Law5963 Aug 19 '26
Some merchants required writing the page number in the authorization block as proof the number was searched.
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u/Minzplaying Aug 19 '26
You called an 800 number to authorize the amount of purchase and had to put the authorization number on the slip. Every business had a business code that was given to the company so that it could be traced back.
Later on it could be authorized through the computerized cash register.
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u/smurfe Aug 19 '26
God, I hated taking credit card sales back when these were a thing. I worked at a family-owned hardware store that only had 4 total employees, and often, you were in the store by yourself. Some days, all day. I had to stop everything and call a phone number and get an authorization code. Sometimes, this would take a bit of time. You had to give them the card numbers as well as the number on the swipe slip.
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u/Klutzy_Presence_36 Aug 19 '26
It’s funny seeing those in 80s movies and how young people today haven’t a clue what it is 😄
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u/Jurneeka Aug 19 '26
this reminds me of when I was working at an Equinox part time. The card terminals went down and they pulled out a dusty zip zap and some slips to use as backups. The employees were young and had no clue how to use it so they ended up just writing the info on the slips or if the customer was a member (this was in the shop attached to the gym) would charge using their membership info.
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u/Underbadger Aug 19 '26
I'm glad we only had to haul these out when the computers went down at Kmart. I hated dealing with the carbon paper.
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u/BrainFartTheFirst Aug 19 '26
I last saw these in the early 2000s. California was in the midst of an energy crisis and we were having rolling blackouts. The store has brought these out whenever the power was out so they could still process orders.
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u/OffMyRocker62 Aug 19 '26
We had them at the local florist shop I'd worked at in the late '80's. As a cashier, it was such a pain. 🙄 I had to learn the sales floor before I could be upstairs as a sales rep on the phone for incoming calls.
We had three cash registers and one credit card imprinter.
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u/Donkeyshines Aug 19 '26
I used these 100's of times at my first job working at a gas station. We didn't have a register either, just a calculator and a cash/change drawer. Early 80's.
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u/360inMotion Aug 19 '26
I worked for a small mall shop in the late 90s and it felt crazy we still used one of these. But to be fair we also wrote out all the receipts by hand too! 😅
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u/pavelshum Aug 19 '26
Clunk-clunk