Plastic continues to be fantastic. The usual boggling statistics are on display from the Credit Card Research Group. Apparently we collectively spent 163 billion pounds on 3.9 billion purchases using our flexible friends last year. That works out to 5,000 per second and an increase in spending of more than a fifth on the previous year. There are approximately 48 million credit cards in issue now and a further 49 million debit cards .
Growth continues despite the economic slowdown.
Despite signs of economic slowdown abroad and the death of domestic tourism as a result of the foot and mouth epidemic, there has been no let-up in cards pending yet this year. Growth in spending on debit cards was almost double that on credit cards although spending on the latter was still marginally higher overall. Both this year and last year witnessed a sharp bounce back in spending in he month of February after the traditional post-Christmas dip. It is a new trend which is being put down as a consequence of what used to be the January sales increasingly starting before Christmas. Apply for one of these cards and you stand the chance of winning up to 100 times the amount you spent on the card each month.