What is "hire-purchase"

Usage examples of "hire-purchase".

The house was a well-kept but unpretentious place with the type of furnishings that are bought on the hire-purchase system, and Gregory judged that Elvdalen was probably a minor official of some kind—perhaps to do with the fisheries or the forests—as the only thing which made the living-room into which their host conducted them at all out of the ordinary was that on one wall there was a number of large-scale maps of the district, which had evidently not been pinned up recently for they were yellow from exposure.

The hire-purchase system bridged a financial gap, and one bright and memorable Sunday morning he wheeled his new possession through the shop into the road, got on to it with the advice and assistance of Grubb, and teuf-teuffed off into the haze of the traffic-tortured high road, to add himself as one more voluntary public danger to the amenities of the south of England.

Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.