Everything Is Becoming a Bank
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
>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.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/buy-now-pay-late...
It's also a bit misleading because if you included every company that holds onto pre-paid customer money as the denominator, Starbucks may be be way lower down.
My energy company at some point managed to get four-figures of my money in their bank account as "credit" before I could get it back.
Games companies where you buy "tokens" for in game use also must be sitting on huge reserves. And any business that sells you "packages" up front, from hairdressers to IVF (probably individually quite small, though).
In China, almost every restaurant and shop has a membership program where you get discounts for topping up certain amounts. When you have 500 in the account and your meal is 145.63, there's often a small interest-free loan to the business sitting there.
I've seen this when checking out online, but never in my local grocery stores.
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"
This is incorrect.
When you use the Klarna app at checkout in person at actual physical stores on your phone you can definitely do this in person. Tons of people use their phones to pay for all the things these days.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I also hope my use of random names and emails for captive portal logins is annoying someone somewhere. Tip for anyone looking: its rare you need to give a real email, because if you need to get on the WiFi, they can't really assume you can receive an email until you do.
At least, when I do see ads, they seem very untargeted generic to me so hopefully the algorithms are struggling to lock on!