The shop tab, the notebook and the credit line that refills

For most of the last century a Scottish grocer’s counter had a book under it. Regulars in a village or a tenement street bought bread, milk and tobacco on tick through the week, the shopkeeper wrote down the sum against their name, and the account was settled when the pay packet or the pension came in. It was credit in every sense that matters, at no interest, secured by nothing more than the fact that both sides would see each other again on Monday.

Who owns the counter now

In many Scottish villages the counter now belongs to the customers. When the last shop in a place closes, residents increasingly buy it or open their own, as the people of Dalmarnock did in 2010. Plunkett, the charity that supports community ownership across the UK, counted about 240 community shops then. Its report for 2025, Community Ownership: A Better Form of Business, found 828 community-owned businesses of every kind trading across the UK, shops and pubs among them, with a long-term survival rate of 94 per cent.

A shop owned by its members faces the old question of the slate in a sharper form. Whatever sits unpaid in the book is stock the members’ own shop has handed over and not been paid for, and a committee of volunteers has to decide who may run a tab and for how long. A committee that keeps one is back on the shopkeeper’s old terms: known names, small sums and a day each month by which the line is cleared.

The notebook behind a Romanian counter

In rural Romania the book never went away. Buying pe caiet, on the notebook, is still common in village shops. The customer takes what is needed, the shopkeeper writes the name and the sum in an ordinary school exercise book, and the debt is paid when the pension, the wages or the social benefit arrives. Romanian television has reported it in the majority of rural shops, and shopkeepers say plainly that without the notebook nobody would come through their door, because in a village where money arrives once a month few could shop between payments.

It sits uneasily with the rules. A Romanian shop is meant to issue a till receipt at the moment of sale, and a sale on the notebook is often recorded only when it is paid. Shopkeepers keep it anyway, and they keep it on a short leash. A customer who has not paid what is owed does not get a new line, and a debt left for months, as one shopkeeper put it, ends the friendship.

What the slate and the notebook share is an end. Every line in the book points at a known day when it will be paid, and the shopkeeper can see the whole debt on one page. Nobody’s tab grows just because they came back.

The tab that refills

The notebook has a modern successor in Romania, and it lives on a phone. Non-bank lenders sell credit lines rather than loans, and Avinto describes its own in exactly the terms of a shop tab: the customer draws what is needed, the money reaches a debit card at any hour, and once a draw is repaid the limit is available again without a new application. A tab that refills itself is not money anyone has. It is a standing offer to lend, and each repayment reopens it.

That is the difference worth keeping in view. The shopkeeper decides each month whether to write another line; the line of credit has already decided, and the only judgement left in the transaction belongs to the borrower. A full limit on a screen reads like a balance in a bank account, and after a repayment it looks the same as it did on the first day.

The habits of the notebook are the ones that make such a line safe to hold. Each draw is a separate debt with its own purpose, and its repayment day is chosen before the money is taken, from an income that is known to be coming, the way a village customer names the pension day. A draw without a day of its own is the limit being spent. And a draw is never taken to pay off another draw. The shop would refuse to open a fresh line for a customer who had not cleared the last one, and a borrower has to apply the same rule alone, because the app will not.

When the month does not reach

None of this answers the household that runs short every month, in either country, and neither a slate nor a line of credit should be asked to. In Scotland, Citizens Advice Scotland gives free advice on debt, online and through local bureaux across the country. In Romania, ANPC, the consumer protection authority, takes complaints from consumers, and a dispute with a bank or a non-bank lender can be taken free of charge to CSALB, the banking sector’s alternative dispute resolution centre.

For a community shop weighing whether to keep a slate at all, the Romanian notebook gives the other side’s view. It works for a short list of known names, a fixed day, and no new line until the old one is closed, and it stops working the moment any of the three is let go.