The first credit bureau in the United States was the Mercantile Agency, which was founded in 1841. The agency used correspondents to collect information about lenders and borrowers across the country, and this information was entered into a ledger that was centralized in New York City. The ledger contained information about a businessperson's marital status, ethnic background, credit history, and age. However, it would take hundreds of years to develop a national centralized credit bureau. Other early credit bureaus included the Retail Credit Company (RCC), which was founded in 1899 and developed files on millions of Americans over the next 60 years. RCC collected data on credit, capital, character, as well as information on individuals' social, political, and sexual lives. By the end of the 1880s, surveillance of retail customers existed in major urban centers. Equifax, one of the major credit bureaus today, was started in 1898 by a grocery store owner who created a list of creditworthy customers and sold the list to other businesses. The first computerized bureau went online in 1965, starting the automation and consolidation of consumer credit reporting.