20 Everyday Items Families Once Bought A Dollar At A Time

GMAC, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, was founded in 1919 and pioneered the financing of automobiles. Under its financing program, customers made a small down payment and then paid for their cars over a year or so, in contrast with Henry Ford’s savings plan, under which customers were to save up the entire price of their cars before taking delivery of them. Distrustful of debt, Ford nonetheless found his program unsuccessful. By the mid-1920s, about three-quarters of new cars were sold on installment plans, and GM outsold Ford.

Jewelry chains Kay Jewelers and Zales started offering diamond engagement rings on weekly layaway instead of insisting on cash payment, as was traditional in stores serving wealthy clientele. With “A Dollar Down and a Dollar a Week” and a coupon-book payment system, working-class men were, for the first time, able to afford a diamond engagement ring. The practice helped to normalize diamond engagement rings across income levels.

In the wake of the war, RCA, Admiral, and Motorola manufactured their line of mass-market black-and-white sets. Though they could cost several hundred dollars, retailers worked with banks to arrange financing plans that allowed customers to pay $10 a month for a year or two. It was an ingenious way to introduce TVs to the masses in a hurry, getting them into American homes faster than most consumer items.

It was Isaac Singer who invented the sewing machine, but it was Singer’s business partner Edward Clark, also a founder of Singer Manufacturing Company, who made the sewing machine democratic. Furniture dealers had been offering installment sales for decades, but it was Clark who introduced the idea to the sewing machine industry. In 1856, he offered a hire-purchase plan that enabled working-class families to rent a $100 Singer sewing machine, paying a few dollars down and a few more dollars each month until the machine was theirs.

The GE Monitor Top, named for its bulbous compressor perched on top, was roughly $300 in the late 1920s, more than a used Model T. To make them affordable, regional electric utilities worked with GE and Frigidaire to slip a small installment payment onto the home’s regular electric bill, paid out over two to three years. It was meant to replace the icebox and to get more homes using more electricity.

Prior to the invention of radio or the phonograph, there was one sign that the family had truly made it: an upright parlor piano stood in the living room. With prices between $200 and $500 for pianos manufactured by companies such as Baldwin, Kimball, and Steinway, few working families had enough money saved up to purchase the instruments outright. Piano dealers, however, offered contracts under which a customer could buy the piano for a few dollars a month for several years. The dealer retained legal ownership of the instrument until the last payment was made, and before long, these pianos populated the parlors of many immigrant and working-class families.

The Victrola, first sold by the Victor Talking Machine Company in the early 1900s, was designed as an internal-horn phonograph cabinet and promoted not as a piece of machinery, but as a piece of fine living room furniture. Mahogany Victrolas retailed for as much as $200, with Victor’s dealers offering standard contracts of $5 down and $5 a month. For many Americans, the installment plan enabled them to adopt recorded music as a daily routine in their home long before anyone could take such an innovation for granted.

In the mid-1920s, the American living room was centered on the wooden box console radio. Made by Atwater Kent, Zenith, or RCA, these early sets were expensive. Car loans had spawned sales-finance companies, and they began offering radio installments that could be paid off over a couple of years. By 1928, over 70% of home radios were financed. It helped fuel the explosion of broadcast radio in American homes.

Window air conditioners, sold by such companies as Philco, Fedders, and General Electric, hit the market in the early 1950s. Since most households didn’t have central air conditioning, the hefty price tag, $350 to $500, called for a special seasonal installment plan that allowed customers to pick up their unit in May and pay in increments throughout the summer and fall months.

In 1807, the New York City retail merchant Cowperthwait & Sons allowed young working- and middle-class couples to move out with a complete suite of furniture immediately, making weekly or monthly payments on credit rather than waiting to amass the cash needed to buy the entire set outright. This arrangement is documented in the ledger books of the store. If a customer failed to meet payment obligations, Cowperthwait & Sons retained legal title to the goods and could recover them. More than 100 years before automobiles and radios, Cowperthwait had already established the basic structure for what would become the American way of buying on credit.

In the mid-20th century, a silver flatware chest in a velvet-lined case was the centerpiece of middle-class hospitality, and department stores offered them through a series of Silver Clubs. Customers paid about a dollar a week and got their place settings as the payments added up. They were also offered a choice of electroplated patterns such as 1847 Rogers Bros., or more expensive solid sterling sets.

One of the first credit systems to take root in America was developed by Cyrus McCormick, who invented a mechanical grain reaper. His system, which went into use in the late 1840s and 1850s, linked credit payments to the farming year. Farmers wanted the machine to harvest their wheat, but they didn’t have the money until the crop was harvested and sold. McCormick asked for roughly $35 up front, as well as freight charges and interest. The rest would be paid after the fall harvest. A similar arrangement was used in the 1920s when International Harvester offered credit on its line of motorized tractors.

In the 1920s and 1930s, chains such as Bond Clothes financed tailored suits and coats for the city clerk and the factory worker. “A Dollar Down and a Dollar a Week,” their advertising trumpeted. The rich patron of the department store could walk in and charge clothes on an interest-free 30-day account, but the working man could not. The credit clothiers’ solution was to keep ledger books by the week and add a carrying charge. This way, the average working man could wear clothes for work and play that he might not otherwise be able to afford.

In the 1920s, an electric wringer washing machine made by Thor, Maytag, or Hurley cost between $100 and $150, amounting to several weeks’ wages for most families. Dealers promoted these machines with the phrase “Pay as It Saves,” reasoning that a consumer could pay off his or her washing machine in installments for less money per month than a laundress or local washerwoman would charge for the service. With a relatively small down payment, customers repaid the machine over the course of one or two years, while the machine’s savings paid the bill.

When Hoover and Electrolux introduced vacuum cleaners in the first half of the 20th century, they were rarely available in stores. Salesmen demonstrated them by running the machines over a householder’s carpets and then closing the deal with a deposit and a series of small monthly payments. For the price tag of $50 to $80, a significant amount in those days for families of modest means, the salesman was selling not just a machine, but credit.

With prices ranging from $30 to $60, cast-iron wood and coal cookstoves could be had from the Kalamazoo Stove Company, which bypassed local stove dealers and encouraged customers to order directly from the manufacturer in what was called “A Kalamazoo Direct to You,” later joined by Sears, Roebuck and Co. and other mail-order companies. With an in-home trial period and an installment payment plan of just a few dollars a month, even the most cash-poor farm households could replace the fireplace or basic stove with a gleaming cast-iron cooking range.

In order to be punctual for work at factories or to keep up with the railroad timetables, it was essential in the late 19th century that industrial workers have a reliable timekeeper, but pocket watches could be prohibitively expensive. To solve this problem, street vendors and jewelers would form Watch Clubs, where members would each chip in a dollar a week to a common fund. Every week, one member would be selected to receive a watch, say an Elgin National Watch Company or American Waltham Watch Company gold-filled watch costing between $20 and $40, ahead of schedule, and all the members would then continue to make payments until the watch was paid for in full.

In the latter part of the 1800s, the National Publishing Company dispatched canvassers to go from house to house selling ornate family Bibles. They were bound in fine leather with brass clasps and embossed with intricate engravings. The family was given the opportunity to write its own history inside. The canvasser would collect one dollar from the customer as a deposit on the Bible and leave it there. Then, a month later, he returned to get another dollar and did the same every month thereafter until the book was fully paid for.

The president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, put together a 50-volume anthology titled the Harvard Classics that he claimed would give a liberal education in just a few minutes every day. Through door-to-door salesmen and magazine ads, a publisher named P.F. Collier & Son sold the Five-Foot Shelf of Books, as it came to be called, to working- and middle-class families, selling not all the books at once for a lump sum they couldn’t afford, but instead selling the whole library a few dollars at a time.

Retailers found creative ways to get bikes into the hands of working-class customers. During the bicycle boom of the 1890s, Columbia safety bicycles from the Pope Manufacturing Company cost about $100, the equivalent of several months’ wages for the average worker, and clerks and factory workers could buy them on installment. Arnold, Schwinn and Co. marketed its bikes through local hardware stores and catalog retailers, selling them “for a dollar a week” and through holiday layaway in the 1920s and 1930s. These payment plans made the bicycle a popular gift for children.

This content was created with the help of AI.