An 815% Price Increase and Nobody Blinked: Inside the Ultimate Pricing Power

In 18th-century England, before the advent of credit cards, credit bureaus, or credit scores, trust was a personal matter.

If you wanted to buy flour or tea on credit from the local shopkeeper, he’d pull out a leather-bound ledger and write it down.

Each regular customer had a page.

If you paid on time, your page stayed clean.

If you delayed or skipped payment, the shopkeeper would scribble a note in the margins: “Slow to pay.” “Missed twice.” “Watch him closely.” These weren’t official ratings. There was no math involved. It was judgment, pure and simple.

That judgement was highly subjective and prone to biases.

Maybe you rubbed the shopkeeper the wrong way. Maybe you were late once, and the mark stayed with you forever. Or maybe your cousin borrowed money and vanished, and you were guilty by association. But in that small village, your financial reputation started and ended with whoever owned the ledger.

It was a decent system for its time and place, but it couldn’t scale.

As commerce expanded and people began borrowing from banks instead of merchants, lenders needed a more effective way to assess trust.

Something objective. Repeatable. Data-driven.

The solution was a score.

Today, that score follows you everywhere.

It decides if you qualify for a mortgage. It influences your car insurance rate. It can even determine whether a landlord hands you the keys or keeps looking.

Most people know they have a credit score. Fewer know who builds it. Even fewer realize that nearly every lender in the country pays to use the same one.

This company doesn’t lend money. It doesn’t issue credit cards. It doesn’t run ads or compete for your attention. It simply owns the system everyone else relies on.

It took the old shopkeepers’ judgment and turned it into a dominant business with immense pricing power and high barriers to entry.