[HN Gopher] Everything Is Becoming a Bank
___________________________________________________________________
Everything Is Becoming a Bank
Author : colinprince
Score : 28 points
Date : 2025-10-07 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobin.com)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _More Americans than ever are in debt to their nearby grocery
| store due to predatory "buy now, pay later" loans offered during
| checkout._
|
| I've seen this when checking out online, but never in my local
| grocery stores.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Typically you'd also be in debt to the BNPL provider, not the
| merchant.
| legitster wrote:
| This only exists if you are using delivery services like
| instacart.
|
| Which suggests a wild scenario that people can't afford
| groceries but are using a luxury service to buy and deliver
| them.
|
| "It was the best of times - it was the worst of times"
| garbawarb wrote:
| Is that predatory? Can't you just decline the offer?
| busymom0 wrote:
| I have seen that on Walmart self checkout machines here in
| Canada.
| spookybones wrote:
| My partner convinced me to use the Starbucks app for incentives.
| Unsurprisingly within months, the company doubled the points
| requirements for all rewards. I now have a dollar and change held
| hostage on it, but refuse to keep topping it up. I imagine there
| are many people in my situation.
| gruez wrote:
| >Unsurprisingly within months, the company doubled the points
| requirements for all rewards.
|
| Surely that was a coincidence? The most I could find was
| grumblings about the program changing back in 2019[1], but so
| far as I can tell it stayed the same since then. I agree points
| devaluations are bad, but people aren't storing their life
| savings in them, and the "cost" of those points are basically
| zero, so I'm not sure what the hand-wringing over them is
| about.
|
| [1] https://www.areweadultsyet.com/2019/03/19/maximizing-the-
| new...
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Once upon a time, 1 pence was one point (I don't recall which
| supermarket). Now you get 2 Nectar points per pound. I do
| remember my parents grumbling when it went to 1 point per two
| pence.
|
| The supermarkets have gotten wise to people realising points
| and vouchers are scams that almost never pay out substantially
| and have instead started punishment pricing for people who
| don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.
| gruez wrote:
| >The supermarkets have gotten wise to people realising points
| and vouchers are scams that almost never pay out
| substantially for loyalty
|
| It's called a "loyalty" program but there was hardly any
| "loyalty" to begin with. The points basically translate into
| a discount of <1%, and you get them whether you hop between
| stores for the best deal, or only shop at their place. The
| best way of thinking of them is a price discrimination scheme
| to rope in price-conscious shoppers.
|
| >and have instead started punishment pricing for people who
| don't opt into data collection, sorry, loyalty cards.
|
| From a numeric perspective the two are identical.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| I often think of them as a tax on people who don't want to
| carefully tailor their shopping to line up with shifting
| "deals" across supermarket chains and over time and those
| who don't have enough storage-times-consumption to benefit
| from buy-n-get-one-free on kilo packs of margarine.
|
| I don't think they are _identical_ as such, because my
| impression is that points would not routinely exceed 5% of
| your overall shopping unless you got lucky or shopped very
| carefully, but these days "savings" from avoiding the
| punishment price regularly accounts for 5-10 pounds out of
| 100 pounds of shopping. Though maybe more people use the
| cards now to avoid it so it does average out.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| One more step in the long road forecast by the prophet Stross to
| singularity via deconstructing the solar system for computronium
| in which to run financial transactions.
| gruez wrote:
| The first section of the article is riddled with errors or
| misleading statements that it's hard to take the rest of it
| seriously.
|
| >Starbucks holds nearly $2 billion of customers' money in its
| rewards program. That's more than the total deposits managed by
| 85 percent of chartered banks, making the coffee chain one of the
| biggest financial institutions in the country.
|
| Only in the sense that the US has thousands of banks, most of
| which are tiny. According to https://www.mx.com/blog/biggest-us-
| banks-by-deposits/, there are 4462 banks in the US. Starbuck's
| "nearly 2 billion" makes them so small it's not even in the top
| 250. You'd really have to stretch the truth to call that "one of
| the biggest financial institutions".
|
| >More Americans than ever are in debt to their nearby grocery
| store due to predatory "buy now, pay later" loans offered during
| checkout.
|
| >And if you can't pay your rent on time, it could soon become
| common for your apartment building owner to lend you the money,
| putting you in debt to your landlord.
|
| As others have mentioned, the debt is issued by the BNPL
| provider, not the grocery store or landlord. The article makes no
| effort to argue how it's any different than credit cards.
|
| Skimming the rest of the sections, it's unclear what author
| actually wants. The article starts off lamenting how high of a
| margin payments networks have, but then lambasts challengers for
| setting up networks try to disrupt them.
| pants2 wrote:
| With high treasury yields, earning money on held cash is a big
| business. Starbucks' $2b of rewards holdings makes them ~$100M /
| yr!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-07 23:01 UTC)