It's smart money. Such upstanding consumers would naturally pay their bills in a timely manner. However, consumers who pay on time are not the people that the banks really seek to have credit cards. They are almost thieves, problematic people who dare to enjoy the convenience of the credit card without making their fair contribution to the interest charges that generate seventy-five percent of the banks' credit card profits. Once the banks realized that good payers were not their ideal customer, they began to go after people who would be more likely to pay the monthly minimum and carry a revolving balance on which interest had to be paid.
College students are an especially desirable target group for the credit card companies.
An added bonus in reaching the young is brand loyalty. MasterCard believes that sixty-five percent of people will continue to use their first brand of credit card for fifteen years or more. To the banks, the college student who defaults is simply a negative statistic in an overall profitable enterprise. Self-deception is hardly limited to college students. For example, during the 1980s many people simply denied that they paid interest on their credit cards, when in fact two-thirds of them did.