Credit: Toward a Cashless Society

To prove the effectiveness of its own credit card, the Bank of America earlier this year hired a comely San Francisco secretary named Ann Foley to live on it—and nothing else—for a month. Miss Foley went pretty far on the Bank-Americard: she ran up $1,728.98 in bills for the nation's largest bank, found that about the only inconveniences she suffered were having to hire cars instead of cabs, avoiding tolls and passing up soft drink machines. Now U.S. banks are busy trying to discover just how far they can go with credit cards....