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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day when I was a poor college student I rented a movie from a local video store. It was an old movie and because of my laziness I failed to return it on time. But eventually did and they wanted a $40 late fee, which was a lot of money for me at the time. A new copy would have cost less.

So I stopped being a customer and went to a competitor.

My first reaction was to disagree with this new library policy. But if poor people want to read books and forget to return them, it doesn’t help to punish them. Sometimes we just have to accept that a certain percentage of society can’t or won’t do socially responsible things all the time.

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I think if you were to do this today, the video store would report to the credit bureaus do they could make you a little less likely to get an apartment or that next job.

So I think we've made progress...

Or file a police report and charge you with felony degree embezzlement 20 years later: https://gizmodo.com/woman-hit-with-embezzlement-charges-for-...

I had no credit. I think they asked for an ID and that was it. I returned their property but didn’t pay their fine.

Is it common for companies to check the credit history of job candidates? Why would they care? they're the ones paying you.

Dunno if it’s common, but the justification I’ve heard is that if you have financial problems you’re more likely to be tempted to commit petty theft and/or embezzlement to compensate.

It varies on sector. Banking/financial is much more likely to do this than other sectors. It's also more common lower down the economic ladder, just one more way we punish the poor for their poverty.

My wife and I were always able to wait out Family Video. If we had a late fee on one account we'd use the other's account until we got a call to come back, get the late fee forgiven, and get a free rental or something.

They didn't survive the pandemic, but I doubt that was the tipping point.

> But if poor people want to read books and forget to return them, it doesn’t help to punish them. Sometimes we just have to accept that a certain percentage of society can’t or won’t do socially responsible things all the time.

As someone who isn't and didn't grow up poor, yet has yet to ever return a borrowed library book (which is why I stopped going to libraries decades ago), I find your conflation of "poor people" and "can't or won't do socially responsible things" to be quite telling -- about your attitudes with respect to poor people.

I suggest you re-evaluate your ideas about intersection of socio-economic status and social responsibility, as it seems that you're wildly off-base[0] there.

[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-unexpected-link-betwee...

I think the problem is much rather that for anyone not poor late fees just don’t matter in any way financially. They do not cut into any basic needs, they don’t even matter in the grand scheme of things.

The thing with being poor is that any additional expense will mean you have to make difficult trade-offs. Which is to say that even if someone who is not poor is much more likely to be late to return a book the late fees just don’t matter to that person, while they do matter for someone who is poor.

>The thing with being poor is that any additional expense will mean you have to make difficult trade-offs. Which is to say that even if someone who is not poor is much more likely to be late to return a book the late fees just don’t matter to that person, while they do matter for someone who is poor

Exactly. I'm not sure why you thought I felt otherwise.

Rather, I took issue with GP's assertion that if you're poor, you aren't socially responsible. Which is both absurd and offensive.

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