A man in the foyer will offer you a warm cuddly teddy bear, absolutely free, for you to take home and cherish. And all you have to do to become the proud owner of Teddy is sign up, there and then, for a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter credit card.
Just sign on the dotted line, and a huge credit limit can be yours as well as the teddy bear; all you have to do is pay the interest charges. Once, it was only detergents that gave things away, such as plastic daffodils, and that was thought to be a pretty low-grade sales technique. Now financial marketing has moved into areas where even soap powders do not deign to tread.A recent survey showed that 50 per cent of all junk mail in the UK comes from the financial sector, and most of that is from people pushing credit cards – in other words, trying to get us to borrow money from them.

Credit cards are offered by phone, on-line over the net, and almost every store in the high street has its own credit card.Mark, who took the excellent photo at the top of the page, walked into Moss Bros the other day and was offered not just a Moss Bros suit but a Moss Bros credit card, offering an instant £1,000 worth of credit, if only he signed on the dotted line. What he had actually gone in there for was a suit.In the old days, one went into a shop to spend money. These days, it seems, you walk into a shop to get offered the stuff. Use the card to buy your Christmas presents is the line the high-street stores are pushing Enjoy Christmas now, pay for it later, and less painfully Call it Santa on the never-never.

We knew he lives in never-never land; we didn’t know that he brought it with him.This aggressive pushing is understandable. The rates of interest they charge on credit cards would make Shylock blush.In a three-minute phone call I had discovered that I, as a financial innocent, could have borrowed £15,000 from Egg bank (see below). How rich, I thought, could I become through a wander down the high street? It is not as though I am a particularly good risk. I am self-employed; my earnings fluctuate wildly; I am past middle age, assuming I snuff it at 90.

Yet Kensington High Street proved a better potential gold mine than the Klondike.Boots the Chemist had their Advantage card on offer, which offered me lots of money at 0 per cent interest till June; since it is run by Egg it would presumably have produced the same lending limit of £15,000 that Egg had already offered me. Marks & Spencer calls its card “Retail Therapy”, which is true until you have to start paying the interest charges of 18.9 per cent. This is, however, lower than the Mothercare, Habitat and BHS cards, all at 26 per cent, Ikea at 26.8 per cent, and Debenham’s which charges a whopping and absolutely indefensible 28 per cent for its card.Woodhouse menswear shop offered me an instant £1,000 of credit, to spend that very moment; at Russell and Bromley, the shoe shop, you can have £250, and all you have to do to get it is be over 18 and have two proofs of identity, and not be positively unemployed. Another on-the-spot £1,000 was available from Blazer, which is linked to Moss Bros and to Boss, and to PC World, and to B&Q, and to Victoria Wine, in all of which you can use the Blazer card.

River Island gives you £350 – or, rather, lends it to you free for 54 days, then charges 29.9 per cent on it, which is as good as 30 per cent interest, ever after. Unless, of course, you repay them by direct debit; in which case they charge just 28 per cent, which is kind, though I hesitate to use the word generous.Refreshing in this sea of Christmas commercialism was the smallest sign for a shop credit card of all It was in the Oxfam shop. The Oxfam Visa card, run by the Co-op Bank, offers all the things that the other cards do – credit limits and the rest of it; the difference is that for every £100 you spend on it, the Co-op gives 25p to Oxfam. The same bank runs similar schemes for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Amnesty International. And they don’t offer free teddy bears.Let us leave the temptations of the high street and the horrible debt one could land oneself in when those monthly repayments fall due. Let us turn instead to the temptations of the telephone-selling of credit cards.