.From BNet's "ask the experts"...The National Retail Federation (NRF) says debit cards will be the go-to payment system for 43 percent of holiday shoppers; that’s up from about one-third who used debit cards for their holiday spending in 2005. At the same time, the NRF survey says less than 30 percent of holiday shoppers intend to put their purchases on credit cards, the lowest level since 2002.
The Creditcardless: A Fast Growing GroupThe shift from credit to debit card usage isn’t some seasonal aberration. The TransUnion credit bureau announced yesterday that 8 million Americans stopped using bank-issued credit cards this year, on top of the 70 million who were already card-free. Of course, plenty of those card-eschewers had their cards cut up for them as banks have aggressively closed down their riskiest credit card accounts in the wake of the financial crisis. But according to TransUnion, this isn’t just about shutting down subprime card accounts: “[C]onsumers with higher incomes were just as likely as consumers with lower incomes to suspend their use of this payment option.” TransUnion VP Ezra Becker added that the expanding ranks of the credit cardless is “one of the fastest growing consumer segments.”
Indeed, in yet another survey, Javelin Research says credit card usage is at an all-time low, with the number of people using them falling from 87 percent of consumers in 2007 to 56 percent in 2009. And once the year-end 2010 data rolls in, Javelin says we could officially become a debit and prepaid card nation as it expects credit card usage to dip below 50 percent. <>
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