Methods of Shopping

Recent news articles concerning internet scamming of sites that a lot of online shoppers use makes me remember earlier days and methods of shopping and banking. First, I am sure that our parents and grandparents could never have visualized that we would one day order so many necessities for our lives with just the click of a button. Of course, past generations had the convenience of mail order catalogs, but that required the accompaniment of a check. Checks couldn’t be used in a scam like our credit and debit cards of today. Of course, the safe guard was in the hands of our personal bank’s accounting department. These people were expected to become familiar with all customers’ signatures and detect a forgery. Wow, what a responsibility, but most of us never gave it a thought unless someone let something slip through. In the event someone did have checks forged on their account it probably affected only the one customer. In today’s world of hacking, millions of customers are affected. I grew up in the days when we were told “new is not always better.” There are some cases when you just have to agree.