You’ve encountered this scene before—perhaps not in life, but in the nostalgia of an old Western.
It’s 1854, somewhere on the windblown plains outside Dodge City, Kansas, or perhaps the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska, where the frontier still breathes through creaking saloon doors and the scent of saddle leather. Bill Johnson, a weatherworn farmer from fifteen miles yonder, arrives in town astride a horse more familiar with hardship than indulgence. The sun bears down like an unpaid debt.
Bill steps into the general store, where John Frenzer, proprietor and unofficial banker of the county, stands behind the counter, equal parts merchant and magistrate. Bill selects his necessities - sacks of flour, a tin of coffee, perhaps a new pair of boots to replace the ones that lost their soles to the winter past. He places them on the counter and utters a phrase once commonplace and now nearly mythological:
“Put it on my tab, John.”
No formalities. No paperwork. No underwriting algorithm in a distant server farm crunching metadata. Just mutual recognition, a handshake, and the silent weight of shared history. In that world, credit was not an industry. It was character. Trust was not calculated; it was observed, lived, and remembered. A man’s word, once given, was collateral enough. Your name was your score, and your reputation traveled faster than any stagecoach.
But then, civilization happened. Or, at least, its bureaucratic shadow. Credit evolved - or perhaps devolved - into a system. An impersonal, sprawling architecture of files, formulas, and risk models. No longer based on who you are, but on how your behaviors conform to statistical expectations. The handshake gave way to the scoring model; human judgment to the machine-learning model. Today, a stranger's code determines your worth. Where once you stood face-to-face with the man extending you credit, now you plead your case to a black box in Silicon Valley, trained not on your trustworthiness, but your transactional predictability.
Bill Johnson, poor soul, would be denied a department store card in 2025. No credit history, no address that matches the utility grid, no record of him ever opting into a data broker’s surveillance ecosystem. A “ghost” in modern parlance. He might still be good for the debt, but the system no longer knows how to recognize goodness - it only quantifies behavior.
And John Frenzer? In the age of predictive analytics and synthetic identity fraud, he’d be replaced by a tablet at checkout.
Thus, the warmth of a handshake was lost to the sterility of the score.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing a deep dive into the history of the credit report—how it started, how it changed, and who’s really benefiting.
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