Summary
Gen Z is increasingly relying on “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) services for holiday shopping, with spending projected to rise 11.4% this year, totaling $18.5 billion.
These services appeal to younger consumers with limited credit histories but can lead to overextension, as they lack centralized reporting and encourage overspending.
Experts warn of accumulating fees, particularly when BNPL plans are tied to credit cards.
With inflation and rising credit card debt already burdening Gen Z, consumer advocates caution that these services may worsen financial instability despite their convenience.
No clue how you read myself shaming individuals into what I wrote.
I was writing to explain why everyone feels poorer than all the headline Econ numbers say we should feel.
Why all the libs who spent the last year or two telling us ‘the economy is fine actually’ were just factually wrong, functionally gaslighting everyone.
If anything, I call out the media, media friendly ‘economists’ and business people for perpetuating bullshit.
Obviously a general explosion in personal debt levels is a general, systemic problem with systemic solutions?
…
I am all for systemic solutions:
Tax the Wealthy / Tax Corporations
Get rid of student loans, do free tuition
Do a total debt jubilee for those below I dunno 200% poverty income threshold
Cap all consumer credit instruments of all kinds at 3x the Fed Rate
Raise the threshold of income for SNAP and LIHEAP and EITC, etc
Implement universal healthcare, outlaw private insurance, lower costs
Raise the minimum wage
Rent control, automatically expunge all eviction records after 1 or 2 years, actually fund building public housing, write a law that says if a house or condo is on market, unsold, you must drop its price by 5% for every 3 months it remains unsold…
Blah blah, tons of things we could theoretically do.
Only systemic changes will fix systemic issues.
… Are you a bot, or do you just have extremely poor reading comprehension?
Can you explain how me stating that a whole bunch of people have a lot of debt … implies I am blaming them individually for this?
If I told you that black men are much more likely to be sentenced heavily for the same crimes, abused or killed by cops… would you think that means I am implying that that is their fault?
If I told you that trans people have higher suicide rates… am I also implicitly saying that is their fault?
How…are you reading a causal or morally prescriptive blame into these statements that are just data, just statistics… after I have already stated that obviously these are systemic problems that require systemic solutions?