Technology is killing paper payments — but outsized novelty checks are more popular than ever.
Why? Blame the Nazis.
There he is, in the photo: Joseph Goebbels being presented with an oversized check for 200,000 deutschmarks. It’s a version of that moment when money gets handed over today at a charity fundraising dinner — just a million times more sinister, what with all the Nazis. At the same time, though, the details in the picture seem almost quaint: The check itself appears to be nothing more than a large piece of paper upon which someone has doodled, the kind of thing a small child, seeking praise, presents to an adult. The swastika looks lost on the page; the paper is crumpled and bows between the donor’s arms. A particularly violent sneeze could send it flying into the crowd; Goebbels could quite easily fold it carefully and tuck it into the chest pocket of his jacket.
But still, it exists — apparently the first recorded image of a giant check presentation that I could find in the major press agencies’ photo archives. This picture, which sent me down a rabbit hole, appears to be the ground zero for the oversized novelty check: another thing you can pin on the Third Reich. It’s like Godwin’s law made… large.
The embiggening of some everyday objects is logical, more or less. Large cars make people feel safe, and parents like to be able to transport more than two children to school at once. Large spoons allow you to spend less time measuring out seasoning for enough soup to serve 100 people.
Large checks, however, do not make a lot of sense. In fact, they are the opposite of sensible: supersizing a check makes it impractical to hold, impossible to cash, and difficult — unless you are skilled at origami and have well-lined pockets — to transport around. Large pens, which are often seen alongside large checks, are examples of equally misplaced hubris. Bigger does not always mean better. Sometimes it just means awkward.
And yet, like our pizzas, our televisions, and our waistbands, checks have increased in size.
Checks go back a long way. They were used, sort of, in ancient Rome, and in early Muslim caliphates, and in Venice at its trading peak. But the first recognizably check-like document was written in 1659 England, and first printed en masse from 1717. From then on, checks became common currency, used by businesses and ordinary folk alike for centuries.
The ceremonial check started humble, too, simply passed from one hand to another. So we have Albert Einstein looking sheepishly off-camera as he daintily wraps his forefinger and thumb around a regular-sized check in New York 80 years ago. In an act of poetic justice, while Goebbels can lay claim to the first novelty check, Einstein and Henry Morgenthau Sr are celebrating fundraising for the children of displaced German Jews feeling the full pain of life under the Nazi regime.
Today Einstein and Morgenthau Sr would be harangued by a gum-chewing press officer pointing out all the things that are wrong:
It’s too small (that is, it’s a regular check);
It’s being held all wrong (that is, it’s being held like you’d hold a regular check);
It’s too real (that is, you could probably cash this regular-looking check in a regular bank).
There appears to have been a consolidation of check sizing in the 1940s, and in photos from the CBS TV quiz show Lucky Pup, which ran on Saturday mornings from 1948–51, you can see presenter Doris Brown and her creepy puppet partner tussle over a check slightly larger than the norm.
In the 50s and 60s, things are quiet, but in the 1970s, the pace picks up — checks begin to balloon in size, and the photocalls become more extravagant. The Postmaster General supports US athletes; a lion cub acts as bank teller for a $100,000 donation.
It appears that the 1990s was when humanity lost all its shame. Novelty checks come in thick and fast in the photo archives: Golfers hoist giant placards above their head triumphantly on the 18th hole; Princess Diana beams a toothy grin behind checks bigger than her wingspan.
But the popularity of the novelty check seems inversely proportional to popularity of real ones. In the U.S., the number of checks being cashed between 2009 and 2013 dropped 50 percent; In the United Kingdom it was even faster, falling 79 percent over the same period. As a society we’ve grown tired of waiting for checks to clear, and technology means that delay is no longer acceptable. Online payments are everywhere, and checks are being aged out of the marketplace.
“Each passing generation is becoming more familiar using electronic methods of payment than writing on a piece of paper that is physically transported around the country,” says Mark Bowerman of the UK’s Cheque and Credit Clearing Company, an industry body. “Some young people probably would not even have a checkbook or will have written a check; certainly those in their teens and 20s.”
Some people have found an opportunity in all this. A decade ago Daniel James had his own full-service design and marketing agency in the U.K., and started an adjunct company called Big Cheques Ltd. In the last few years, demand has been so great that the agency has shut up shop, and the novelty check sideline has become his main source of income. The fact that people don’t actually use checks as much any more doesn’t really matter to him.
“I’m well aware that using a cheque as a traditional method of payment is certainly less popular than it was,” he admits. “Just because there’s a paper check, a check in a check book, that isn’t the same as making a presentation to somebody. The two things are quite separate now.”
And even if kids might not understand what a real check is, stick a two-foot long piece of cardboard in their hands and they’ll exactly know what to do with it: Grip it and grin, smiling at the flashbulbs as they burn your retinas.
They’ve become something different, pictorial shorthand that harks back to a different age. We still denote functions to save computer files using a 3-and-a-half inch floppy disk icon, even on solid-state hard driven devices. Rotary phone emojis are used in place of cellphones, even though you’re more likely to see them in period dramas than in any modern-day home. The check has a warm, fuzzy nostalgia.
“Having something written in the birthday card that says I’ve electronically transferred [money] to your account isn’t the same as having something fall out of a birthday card. The check dropping out is much more — ” Bowerman struggles to find the words: “I don’t know… life affirming?”
So the popularity of these oversized tchotchkes keeps increasing. The US, UK and Australia are big big check markets. Plus, it turns out, there’s no correlation between the physical size of the check and the donation it represents.
“We’ve seen people creating checks that cost more to make than the actual donation amount,” James says. “I suppose that if you’re going to get on the front page of the local newspaper, that might be worth far more than the value of the donation you’re making.”
The business is not always simple, though.
“You can’t say: ‘This week we’re going to sell more checks than last week,’ because there’s no way of stimulating demand,” James admits. “It’s not like if you sold tins of beans, you can work out ways to increase sales of tins of beans. If you sold soccer shirts you could give away the socks, or give free lettering and numbering on the back. It’s not something we can do in our line of work. We’re a bit more reactive rather than proactive given the nature of the product we sell.”
All of which goes some way to explain James’ other offerings: novelty credit cards, lottery tickets, and airline tickets. Turns out even the novelty payments world has to evolve a bit.
