Credit Card Machines Northampton

Most retail outlets and other businesses in Northampton make use of credit card machines when taking payment from their customers. Indeed, in our modern world where that little plastic card can be used to order services, pay bills and buy food, it’s easy to forget that for thousands of years humans conducted commercial transactions without any such facility.
The earliest human transactions in history would surely have taken the form of bartering arrangements. If a person or community had a surplus of one resource but lacked another, they could arrange to swap goods with someone else, to their mutual benefit. For example, if an ancient community in the area which would one day become Northampton reaped a bumper crop of wheat, but lacked sufficient sheep to breed a healthy flock, they could search for others who had plenty of livestock but not enough cereals to make it through the winter. Their resources became a kind of money. Indeed, the Latin word for money (pecunia) is drawn from pecus, meaning “cattle.” These primitive settlers had no concept of credit card machines or computerized commerce, but they could provide for their families by making deals which benefited everyone in the community.
Fast forward a few generations, and we find systems of book keeping have developed. If a citizen of an early settlement in the Northampton area incurred a debt, this would be recorded by making marks on a piece of wood. The wood was effectively an early credit card, although it certainly wouldn’t pit into the slot on modern credit card machines! The stick would then be split lengthways down the middle, and each party in the transaction would keep their own half as a record of the arrangement. When the debt was settled, the stick was destroyed – the equivalent of writing, “paid in full.”
As commerce developed and became more commonplace in Northampton and elsewhere, it soon became apparent that bulk goods were not the most convenient form of money. Imagine trying to carry around a whole heard of cows in your purse, or taking barrels of wine to the market with which to pay for the weekly shop! There were no credit card machines, so new forms of money had to be devised. Metals such as silver and gold were formed into bracelets and rings, and the value was calculated by the weight of the item. This form of payment still wasn’t as convenient as credit card machines, but things were certainly getting better for Northampton businesses.
Soon these precious metals began to be minted into coins with standardized values, which did away with the need to weight the money during every transaction. Credit card machines in Northampton were still a thing of the future, but commerce was now taking a similar form to one modern business people would recognize.
Today we are in the throes of another commercial revolution, as computerized banking and virtual money replace coins and notes, and credit card machines are used in most Northampton shops.