Also, the Sears charge card has lost its allure for customers, as competing credit cards proliferate.
If smart cards proliferate in the United States and eventually find significant uses, it will be another reminder that technology is often adopted in unpredictable ways.
Card conventions proliferated through the 1980s and 1990s, as did the production of baseball cards.
Credit cards and mortgage options proliferated.
In addition, they say that the O.C.C.'s own oversight efforts were so tepid that risky mortgages, credit card abuses and overdraft fees proliferated.
The problems in credit card lawsuits often proliferate in the shadows, because unlike in foreclosure cases, borrowers sued over credit card debt rarely show up to defend themselves.
Tricks and traps proliferated in the credit card and consumer lending industries.
Card-counting books and Web sites, including those that Jones and Crawford perused, proliferated.
But in those early years, with credit-card numbers circulating among unscrupulous Web masters and affiliates, various frauds proliferated.
Although it was popularized by an episode of the "Seinfeld" series in the 1990's, the phenomenon was first described in a brief article in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1966, when credit cards were beginning to proliferate.
