"It's only a few quid on the card"

Most of the month's total goes on a card, and the card is part of why the total has never been seen.

An earlier book in this series, about buying when low, goes through the research on what a card does to spending, and I'll borrow two findings from it. Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein, in 1998, described what they called the pain of paying, the small unpleasant feeling of handing money over, and argued that credit cards weaken it by separating the buying from the paying, where cash keeps them together. Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava, in 2008, found across four studies that people were willing to spend more when a card logo was present and spent more with tokens than with cash. The card doesn't just carry the money. It changes how much of it you're willing to let go.

Now put the card at the table. "Shall we just split it?" is followed by six cards on the saucer, and each one takes sixty-eight pounds with no pain attached, because the paying happens three weeks later in a statement that has forty other lines on it. If the split were paid in cash, someone would count out three twenties and a five and a three and feel it, and the feeling is the thing that would have made "I'll just put in for mine" come out. The card removes the feeling and with it the sentence.

The card also removes the total. Cash in a wallet runs out, and running out is information. A card doesn't run out at the table. It runs out somewhere else, at a limit, months later, and by then the evenings that filled it have no names. The month's total from chapter 1 is hard to see precisely because it was paid in a way designed not to be seen.

Living on credit, as opposed to using a card, is a different habit with its own book, and it's the next one in this series. The reason I raise the card here is narrower. If you want the price of the evening to register, pay it in a way that registers. Look at the number on the card machine before you tap. Say it to yourself, as chapter 20 will suggest. Or, for a month, take the cash for the evening out beforehand and pay with that, and notice what the counting does to the split. In my experience it does what nothing in this book can do from the page, which is to make sixty-eight pounds feel like sixty-eight pounds.