More Americans are expected to 'buy now, pay later' for the holidays. Analysts see a growing risk
More Americans are expected to 'buy now, pay later' for the holidays. Analysts see a growing risk
Consumers are expected to use “buy now, pay later” payment plans heavily this holiday season, a forecast that bodes well for retailers but that has credit experts again sounding alarm bells.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
As much as the right wing cranks completely misunderstood this, they were right to be upset about it.
It is selling us a world in which we will have to rent access to everything, and telling us we should be happy with that development, where we can be nickel and dimed to death to an eternity. A class of people permanently in debt, a perfect consumer, who will pay them every day for the rest of their lives. That's what companies actually want anyway, a consumer they can count on to give them money month to month until they die.
However, the consumers are also to blame here. It's 2023, and we still have people completely bought into the lie that Black Friday deals are good (they aren't and never were) and that we all need to have an absolute blowout in terms of presents for one another for the "holidays." The number of consumers who haven't stopped to question any of this madness are indeed part of the equation. While corporations sell us down the river and keep buying out our civil rights, there are still plenty of consumers who keep paying more and more, but never stop to question why. Which is honestly really crazy, how could you have made it to 2023 and seen the explosion in costs of, well everything, and not be like "something is amiss here, maybe this game is rigged and wrong?"
I disagree that there were never any good deals on Black Friday, there were at one time just not anymore. Other than that I agree with you.
True. Before they would put out special black friday models that were stripped down in some regards. Now they do that but also jack the price up a month before so they can point and say see, sales!
I just had a little argument with a friend about a party they're having with a gift exchange. I said it was a landfill generator and we should make things or give food. Her argument is that without brightly colored plastic packaged in clear plastic wrapped in plastyicized paper it just wouldn't be Christmas!
Company stores but it’s the whole country instead.
american credit usage/reliance has fucking
skyspace rocketed. All of this pay later bullshit getting normalized to fuck to the point you can fucking payment plan a goddamn pizza.terrifying implications
Debtor’s prison will be a thing again. Or just turn the country into a giant Company Town.
Personally, I’m not buying and not paying. Because I have no money after spending it all on rent and food.
Reminds me of that P K Dick story “Ubik”. Aside from the fantastical stuff that happens in the book the one thing that struck me was the implication that you had to pay for everything. Pay for your shower in your own home. Pay to turn on the TV. Pay to access your apartment. Old fashioned because you’d drop coins into a slot for the access, now you just use subscriptions.
I loved scifi for the amazing possibilities it imagined for the future. Medicine, travel, aliens, materials sciences, etc.
I was reading the wrong scifi, I should have read more of the dystopian stuff by Dick, Gibson, or any other author that shows a world consumed, failing, and decrepit thanks to corporatocracy extracting everything from the people with a useless and ineffective government controlled by corporations.
Far, far more realistic.
Why would you not use it? They offer 0% interest at a time when interest rates are sky high. Someone needs to pay that interest and my guess is that it's built into the price. So you basically pay more by not using it.
I have seen this before. What happens is they offer a grace period like 6mo or 1yr. If you don’t pay off by then you get charged the entire grace period of interest added to the balance.
So in the end your pay for the interest.
If you don't pay it off in time
To be clear, I still think they're toxic and think they should be banned. But you basically pay more by not using them today.
0% interest is the first step on the enshittification of debt. There is benefit to using it and you become accepting and complacent. The last step will be debtors prison.