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Credit scores
It clicked with me the other day that store credit cards are an evolution of the original idea of credit, where an individual lender would allow purchases on credit. But now they are pretty much all the same Visa/MasterCard with different company logos and colors.
Visa and mastercard are just middlemen that offer payment processing. They don't actually do the credit itself.
This is the real answer to this question. Not just an invention to unfairly evaluate folks (and charge them originally to see it!), but nothing more than a "how much we can fleece you for" score that has become so widely embraced you can't ignore it.
Credit scores are at least significantly better than the system that preceded them. On the other hand the system that preceded credit scores was so broken and so racist that pretty much anything would be a significant amount of progress in the right direction
Does this even exist outside of the US?
110%. Same companies keeping record too, like Experian