26/08/2026
Memories like these can be found in our newest book, Lost Treasures of Wisconsin. 💃🕺
If you found a Charga-Plate in a drawer in Wisconsin, the name stamped on the sleeve tells you where somebody's family shopped and roughly when.
Gimbels, most likely. The chain that became a New York institution actually started in Milwaukee in 1887, and the Wisconsin Avenue store was the flagship of the state for generations. Boston Store was the other big Milwaukee name, running downtown since 1897. Schuster's was the third, serving the north side neighborhoods before merging into Gimbels in the 1960s.
Outside Milwaukee the names change by city. Prange's anchored Green Bay, Sheboygan and Appleton. Kresge's, Wieboldt's and various regional chains show up in the smaller markets. Madison had Manchester's on the Capitol Square.
The technology behind all of them was the same. A small aluminum plate, roughly dog-tag sized, with your name and address embossed in raised letters. The clerk slid it into a machine, laid a paper charge slip on top, and pulled a lever that pressed an inked ribbon down over the raised type. Your information transferred to the receipt. Farrington Manufacturing designed the system and it descended directly from military ID tags, which is exactly what they look like.
The Wisconsin detail worth knowing is Schuster's, which ran one of the earliest and most sophisticated charge systems in American retail. The store used punched-card processing to manage accounts decades before that was common, and retail historians point to it as an early example of automated recordkeeping in the industry.
The plates came in small paper or leather sleeves printed with the store name, and that sleeve is usually what survives. Serious shoppers carried three or four.
Everything ended when general purpose credit cards arrived in the sixties. Plastic replaced metal, the plates went into drawers, and there they mostly remain.
Estate sales in Milwaukee turn them up constantly. Gimbels is gone. Boston Store is gone. Schuster's, Prange's, Manchester's, all gone.
The little metal plate outlived every one of them.
