I think people are insufficiently amazed at credit cards. You can walk into a store in a country you’ve been to, pull out a piece of plastic they’ve never seen before, and walk out with basically anything, in seconds, with almost no words exchanged.
And it’s one of the few forms of magic where explaining how it works makes it seem even more improbable rather than less.
“OK check it: a local affiliate of BigCo convinced this shopkeeper to put out a reader. He trusts that anything the reader says is good will actually be paid at end of month. His bank trusts a network which trusts an issuing bank. Most of these parties don’t know each other.”
“How does the bank trust you?” “Oh a computer made a judgement call on me at 3 AM.” “But but but!” “Yeah all the reasons you’re thinking this can’t work are in fact true AND they’re priced in AND it’s still cheap enough to run on a few percentage points of a $8 ticket.”
