Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>Buy Now Pay Later is growing very quickly and taking market share from credit cards, especially for younger consumers.

One of our greatest failings as a society is our abject failure to teach people finances. It's as critical to our lives as breathing, eating, and crapping, yet the vast majority of people can't even count change let alone understand credit.

Incidentally, anyone telling you BNPL is good for you is trying to milk you. Please just don't and stick to cash/debit or good old credit cards, for your friends' and family's sake if not yourself.

View on HN

BNPL is often free to the customer [1], to whom it amounts to a free loan. The merchant, however, is soaked for the interest/fees. So merchant prices will rise slightly, for everyone, to cover those costs..... much like credit cards do now. Cash and debit users subsidize this scheme without getting the free loan.

The downside for the customer is that it promotes overspending, which could be argued as a net negative on the whole. A careful consumer could make use of the free loan, investing the cash elsewhere during the loan period.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/buy-now-pay-later/

Yes, much like credit card benefits and cashback, if you don't take advantage of it, you're effectively subsidising those who do. (In fact, if someone ypu buy from starts offering it and you disagree with it, you should switch to using it, since this will oncrease their fees on existing revenue and maybe make them consider it not worthwhile.)

Also from Bits About Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/anatomy-of-credit-car...

The operative quote in support of this from the link, in support of subsidizing those who don’t and almost more damning because even cash users are subsidizing it as the overall price gets raised to roll in the cost of all the people who do use CCs: “Credit card issuers explicitly and directly charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.”

This, like so many other issues, is an issue that a small but powerful contingent of moneyed interests (e.g. the debt industry, also known as the financial industry) works very hard and spends lots of money lobbying on, in order to ensure we're not solving the problem.

This is not much different from Microsoft fighting open source, Apple fighting right to repair, or Google fighting the CCPA.

As always: Cui Bono? Follow the money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com