The First American Credit Card Was a Coin (2024)

The jangling, shiny objects that poured out of the padded envelope ranged from the mundane—a simple metal plate, like something riveted to a dog’s collar, embossed with the name of a West Virginia tire company—to the stunning, namely a 2-inch-tall cast-metal replica of the Blackstone Hotel, an art deco masterpiece that still dominates Fort Worth’s skyline. The package also contained about a dozen other coins, though they weren’t real money: They were artifacts of a little-known parallel retail-payment system that existed for nearly a century in the United States, and that paved the way for credit cards, tap to pay, and cryptocurrency.

The coins came from Chuck, who asked that I not give his full name. Chuck is one of the founders of the American Credit Card Collectors Society, a group helping to grow a relatively new hobby that is currently a little-known cranny in the world of numismatics (that’s a fancy term for coin collecting). The reason Chuck doesn’t want to be identified is that coin collections are frequent theft targets, and he doesn’t want to broaden the criminal gaze to charge-coin collecting, where the current values are low enough to keep it “a hobby, not speculation.” A former coin collector, Chuck said that investors have so driven up the price of collectible coins—sometimes into the millions of dollars—that the activity is no longer a pastime. Of the thousands of charge coins issued, however, very few are worth more than $100, and many are available for purchase in bulk, sometimes for less than $10 for a handful.

Charge (or credit) coins were first issued just after the Civil War, growing increasingly popular in the years leading up to the Great Depression. The basic concept was simple: metallic tokens, given out by merchants—taxi companies and department stores were especially active—embossed with an advertising message, sometimes a unique image, and an account number. A customer wanting to charge a purchase to their account would present the coin to the merchant, who would then (usually) check a paper file to ensure that the account was up to date. Some coins had a specific monetary limit—like today’s prepaid debit cards do—while others had floating ceilings.

Credit coins range in shape from plain discs and ovals to more elaborate forms, like that one for the Blackstone Hotel or what was likely the last (and somewhat dubious) iteration of the charge coin: the key-shaped, anachronistic, and symbolically loaded Playboy Club tokens distributed in the 1960s. Such coins often had status codes, similar to the way credit cards today adopt an upward ladder of precious-metal names; if a Playboy key had “C1” stamped on it, for example, it meant that the holder was permitted to date club hostesses.

The collector’s group, founded in 1994, currently has about 79 members, and Chuck—whose collection numbers about 100,000 coins—estimates that there are likely no more than 1,000 people involved in the hobby worldwide. This creates low barriers to entry that Chuck sees as an antidote to the professionalism and inaccessibility of modern coin collecting.

Collecting charge coins does involve detective work: figuring out where the retailer issuing them was located, when the coins were introduced, and what they were good for. Sometimes, the charge coin isn’t really even a charge coin—collectors have seen everything from pet licenses to video game tokens to souvenirs misidentified as coins. Figuring out what qualifies, according to the club’s 300-page “Charge Coin Reference Guide,” is an inexact science, but you must be able to prove that the piece was usable in place of cash.

Because so many different merchants issued charge coins, one of the biggest challenges a collector faces is determining not just whether something qualifies for the term but also who issued the coin and when. Sometimes that’s easy, since identifying information is usually printed on the coin. Other times, you don’t have enough in the embossing to determine an object’s provenance. (Charge-coin collector lingo for such an item: a maverick.) Chuck said that identifying a charge coin is “the highest level of our hobby.”

The charge-coin era finally gave way to charge plates—metal rectangles, with embossed, raised letters indicating the holder’s identity. By 1960, charge coins were mostly forgotten, and charge plates would soon be supplanted by modern credit cards. But Chuck estimates that thousands of charge coins are still out there, in old piggy banks and desk drawers, waiting to be discovered. “These are beautiful, historic objects that very few people have ever heard of,” Chuck told me.

It’s that sense of discovery, he hopes, that will continue to drive the hobby—though he’s not counting on luck. When Chuck heard I had two young sons, he sent me that envelope, unsolicited, with a note on it: “ENJOY OR GIVE AWAY TO YOUR KIDS.” When my boys saw the odd, not-quite-money currency spill out of the bag, they didn’t have to be asked—they immediately began dividing them up. “Is it money?” my 8-year-old asked. “Not quite,” I replied, and tried to explain. “Oh,” he said, examining a copper-embossed coin with a coat of arms surrounding a gothic letter “B,” issued by a Baker Hotel, with no location indicated. We quickly looked it up, finding pictures of a now-abandoned building in the former resort town of Mineral Wells, Texas, whose springs were believed to be a possible outlet for the legendary fountain of youth. (Even today, a brand of bottled water from Mineral Wells—it’s called Crazy Water—still exists. For more than a century, some people have seen it as a curative for mental disorders.)

“It’s like every one of these coins is part of a little country of its own,” my son said. “That’s way cooler than credit cards.”