From the 1890s, retailers began to seek safer, more scientific ways of providing and managing credit. Emanating from the United States, innovations in credit technology and management were implemented in Australia. Department stores adopted different credit forms depending on their own distinctive atmosphere or aura, helping to consolidate a hierarchy of credit. Australian workers became entangled in this emerging culture of credit in the broader context of society’s ambiguous attitudes towards usury and credit in general. These included Christian teachings that allowed moneylending without excessive interest rates and the more critical position of socialists, who identified usury as a key component of capitalist exploitation and explored the issue in utopian novels.