tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25425497.post5394791623748248994..comments2012-01-31T17:06:10.780-08:00Anne Corwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04940566603711834053noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25425497.post-33221846955118846542009-03-08T22:11:00.000-07:002009-03-08T22:11:00.000-07:00I love shopping at my local warehouse store - BJ's, but I hate that whenever I do they track all of my purchases by my id and/or credit card. I haven't gotten advertisements as a result, but I do resent the intrusion into my purchases.Matthewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08168033638267621898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25425497.post-22388483066355104282009-02-20T23:54:00.000-08:002009-02-20T23:54:00.000-08:00Increasingly these days, you need a good credit score to get a worthwhile job, as more and more companies run a credit check on all applicants. So getting laid off and going bankrupt as a result can make you unemployable. Talk about a Catch-22.<BR/><BR/>But for me, the biggest scandal is the essentially unaccountable nature of the US credit reporting agencies. These companies collect <I>hearsay evidence</I>, then repeat it to anyone willing to pay a fee. They can commit the most damaging libels and the injured party has no legal redress, except to have erroneous information corrected by a tortuous process long after the damage is done.PThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03368463412393534963noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25425497.post-18246444276623587302009-02-17T05:06:00.000-08:002009-02-17T05:06:00.000-08:00Buying things on credit had always been the mode of the poor, Anne, up until the 1920s, when the first "pay on time" or installments plans were put forth in the US for consumer items. These plans were a marketing strategy by companies that were having a hard time squaring the circle between paying their employees low wages and having enough of a domestic market to buy their goods! <BR/><BR/>The other big source of consumer credit these days is, of course, mortgages. Like you are, most people in the early urban US were renters; until the 1940s most mortgages required at least a 50 percent down payment, which was more than average people had saved. The federal government encouraged mass consumer borrowing to buy homes in the wake of WWII as a way of encouraging suburban construction.Go Democratshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01921729627957540312noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25425497.post-87593550296996504962009-02-15T10:01:00.000-08:002009-02-15T10:01:00.000-08:00<B>Henrik</B> said:<BR/><BR/><I>Being non-American (Swedish), I'm also very much confused and flabbergasted by the high credit card usage in the states - which is also starting to be adopted here, only to a lesser degree.</I><BR/><BR/>Oh wow interesting. I am glad you commented because I've been curious as to whether this is mainly an American thing or not. I can only really write about America because that's where I've lived my whole life, but it is not lost on me that we aren't the whole world here. In any case I think that the way America has been obsessed with credit (and "imaginary money" in general) is a really unstable proposition over the long term. Eventually you lose track of what exactly is being valued in the first place. I really hope Sweden is able to avoid learning that the hard way...<BR/><BR/><I>Your concluding example with a starving family having to rely on credit to put food on the table is constructive (even though relying on credit would of course only make things even harder for the family over time), but for anyone else I can't really see the point of credit at all.</I><BR/><BR/>Me neither. <BR/><BR/><I>Assuming someone values higher rates of consumption of goods and services, wouldn't first saving that money and then purchasing those goods always give you more stuff in the end, compared to continually paying out steep interest on your ever-renewed debts?</I><BR/><BR/>That's what I would think...<BR/><BR/><I>The only thing I can see going for credit cards is instant satisfaction as compared to actually having to save/plan for purchases, which might actually prevent you from some of the more impulsive and less necessary ones. I'd consider that a good thing, but that might make me unusual..</I><BR/><BR/>Well, there's instant satisfaction and there's also the fact that many humans seem to be terribly worried about status. I started noticing this way back in elementary school and was utterly mystified by it. Children in my classes would actually boast about how much their shoes cost, and would go around asking other kids how much <I>theirs</I> cost, and then mocking them if they were too "cheap", or purchased at "unfashionable" stores, or lacked the proper brand logos, etc. Even though it was their parents buying the stuff for them, they seemed to take some kind of weird pride in having what was trendy and expensive.<BR/><BR/>My family was not rich but we weren't really poor either -- we were pretty much middle-class average for the majority of my growing-up years. But I nevertheless got called "poor" as if it were an insult because I did not dress in trendy fashions or wear "cool" brands, and because when something like a backpack ripped or broke I would generally end up fixing it with duct tape or something rather than going out and getting a new one right away. And I imagine these kids had to have gotten those attitudes from somewhere, most likely their own parents.<BR/><BR/>As I've become an adult myself, I've seen a fair bit less of the kind of overt disdain for the non-trendy but there are still a lot of more subtle pressures at work. E.g., a lot of workplaces have dress codes that entail a person's having a whole wardrobe separate from what they'd normally wear around the house and out and about. Some places, supposedly, won't even promote you no matter how good a job you do if you don't dress "at least as well" as your boss (this is all ridiculous and weird to me, I don't understand it, I'm just relating things I've heard/read).<BR/><BR/>Furthermore in a lot of regions here in the US, there's a lot of stigma associated with doing certain things even when it is very practical and economically feasible to do so. E.g., riding the bus. If you don't drive your "own" car, you are seen as somewhat suspect, unless you happen to live in a very metropolitan area (like San Francisco or New York City). Even as a college student I got a lot of pressure from various people to get a driver's license, one of the reasons for this pressure being given as the idea that riding the bus was somehow "beneath" me, which just seemed totally ridiculous. (More on my non-driver status <A HREF="http://www.existenceiswonderful.com/2008/05/confessions-of-non-driving-american.html" REL="nofollow">here</A>).<BR/><BR/>Basically my point here is that yes, some people might be practicing impulse buying a lot, but I would actually suspect that the major reason people use credit frequently is to live in the way they think is expected of them, even when it isn't really practical. <BR/><BR/>Being autistic I've <I>had</I> to find nonstandard ways of doing things in a lot of contexts, and I was also raised in a household which emphasized practicality and fixing things other than status-signaling and buying things, so from where I sit, common American spending habits (not to mention "corporate culture") look really bizarre to me.<BR/><BR/><I>Oh, and your link to philosecurity is broken</I><BR/><BR/>Eek, thanks. I've fixed it. I've never seen that particular link issue before -- what had happened was, I wrote the post in a word processing program (OpenOffice) and I guess I had a default set that changed regular quotation marks into "smart quotes". And for some reason, having the URL surrounded by these so-called "smart quotes" made it try and link circularly to my post while the URL I actually wanted to link was sort of tacked on afterward. Now that I've changed them back to regular quotation marks the link seems to be behaving properly. Weird.AnneChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04940566603711834053noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25425497.post-15648468478602192572009-02-15T01:28:00.000-08:002009-02-15T01:28:00.000-08:00Being non-American (Swedish), I'm also very much confused and flabbergasted by the high credit card usage in the states - which is also starting to be adopted here, only to a lesser degree. <BR/><BR/>Your concluding example with a starving family having to rely on credit to put food on the table is constructive (even though relying on credit would of course only make things even harder for the family over time), but for anyone else I can't really see the point of credit at all. Assuming someone values higher rates of consumption of goods and services, wouldn't <I>first</I> saving that money and <I>then</I> purchasing those goods always give you more stuff in the end, compared to continually paying out steep interest on your ever-renewed debts? <BR/><BR/>The only thing I can see going for credit cards is instant satisfaction as compared to actually having to save/plan for purchases, which might actually prevent you from some of the more impulsive and less necessary ones. I'd consider that a good thing, but that might make me unusual..<BR/><BR/>Oh, and your <A HREF="http://philosecurity.org/2009/01/26/mind-your-business" REL="nofollow">link</A> to philosecurity is broken.Henrikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05824886209481597549noreply@blogger.com