YMMV / Married... with Children S4E8 "976-SHOE"

• Harsher in Hindsight: Steve and the other loan officers at his bank are competing for a trip to Hawaii; Steve is so eager to win that he gives Al a loan (and deliberately inflates the requested amount from $18,000 to $50,000), even though he thinks Al's idea for a "shoe hotline" is a loser. The episode thus anticipated, by 20 years, one of the root causes of the 2008 financial crisis: banks came to regard debt, even bad debt, as such an asset that they promised generous incentives to their employees and associates for generating as much debt as possible - never mind whether the risks being taken were good or not.
• Unintentional Period Piece: This episode aired before the Internet arrived, and here Peg's punishment for falling behind on credit card payments was that a police officer came knocking on her door and confiscated her cards. Nowadays, if you fall behind on credit cards then a credit card company can electronically put a hold on your accounts so that you can't spend anymore, file a notice of missed payments to credit reporting agencies to lower your score and sue you for missed payments.
  • Not to mention that in the present day, loan officers at banks would not be able to approve loans of $50,000 all by themselves, and only within a few minutes after the application is signed. The application would have been turned over to an underwriter, who almost certainly would have rejected the shoe hotline idea (if for no other reason that people can simply look up information about shoes on Google).