But Tim says bad debts are only 0.3% of sales, and with small business increasingly dependent on technology, the potential customer base has scarcely been tapped.
The company reported underlying sales growth of 13% in the third quarter, but said increasing bad debts and a currency hit would impact full-year profits by 2.5%.
The true cost to the country is not a few bad debts but a reduction in long-term investment plans as confidence wanes.
Investors should think twice about using plastic for discretionary items, but remember that all debts aren't bad debts.
For the time being most (though not all) regulators are relaxed about all this: bad debts have been rising, but slowly, and only in a few areas such as lending to commodity-linked industries.
But there is no point forcing banks to recognize bad debts unless overleveraged private-sector balance sheets are restructured too.
But the second problem is that doubts about the bad debts banks may have on their own books have caused their own financing costs to rise.
The result is that debts are rolled over but not settled and quickly go bad again.
China's big state-controlled banks were among the largest initial public offerings in the world when they listed in recent years, but their recent stock performance has been weak, as investors worry that they are carrying bad debts on their books.
But bankers say the rule of thumb is that only about 15% of restructured loans eventually become bad debts (and even they need not be entirely written off).
What some may see as alarming about today's significant rises in the interest rate that Italy, Spain, Belgium and France would all have to pay to borrow is there hasn't been any particularly bad news - but even so, investors remain wary about lending to eurozone governments with relatively high debts and a requirement to borrow substantial sums in the coming year.
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