I'm also bemused by the lack of understanding and empathy in this thread. For all the social righteousness spouted by HN as a whole, this is disappointing to witness
The article's presentation of "These people have no options except to be horrifically exploited" is wrong at best, maybe even dishonest. No matter how much money you make, spending beyond your means because you have to have luxuries you really can't afford is a bad financial play.
I feel a lot of empathy for people who get caught in the RAC trap. They're digging themselves into a hole that they'll never escape from, and that's genuinely sad. But it's a fixable problem! They aren't victims of their circumstances, they're victims of their own consumerism. At the end of the day, each of us is responsible for what we choose to spend our earnings on, and if you choose to spend all your expendable income on instant gratification, that's your choice, and you get to own the consequences of that choice.
I had a family and was self-employed, which meant no guarantee of stable income and self-employment insurance, plus self-employment taxes. My take home covered rent, food, and basic utilities - usually. We certainly couldn't afford new furniture or appliances. We ate at a 10-year-old kitchen table that cost $100 from a grocery store with 4 chairs, which were literally falling apart from use. My couch was second-hand from a garage sale. My car was a used one that I learned to repair myself because I couldn't afford to pay a mechanic to fix it for me.
I could have "afforded" to rent furniture. I even looked at it at one point, did the math on it, and nope'd right out of there. My wife wasn't happy at all - she'd been campaigning for new furniture for a long time - but it was the right financial choice.
I'm in a much more stable financial situation now, but my kitchen table is a used one that my wife and I stripped, sanded, and refinished ourselves. My entertainment center we got from some friends who were moving and didn't have room for it. My TV I picked up on the curb, and it cost me $35 for a new DLP bulb. My coffee table I got for $20 at a furniture outlet store. I still have the garage sale couch.
The situation is a lot more nuanced for me: yes, the people doing the renting do have some responsibility for this, but:
1) I don't see responsibility-shifting as justification for scummy business practices. If what you do as a business is fundamentally scummy (even if legal) then you're a scumbag, period, and deserve to be called out and taunted (and, if it were up to me, regulated out of business). The people running these rent-to-own companies (like most payday loan places, underhanded adware software pushers, etc) are scumbags and I wish the worst kind of bad karma on them, though sadly I don't actually believe in karma.
2) I don't fully understand how someone could have a total lack of empathy for the renters here, though I'm not surprised to see it. If this were a story about some startup founder who just as stupidly maxed all of his personal credit on some startup (ignoring the obvious math of how likely he is to fail, not entirely different from how some are blaming these renters for ignoring the math), there would be a lot more sympathy here, I think, due to relatability (mere exposure effect).
Bad decisions are not something only poor people make, they just happen to pay a much higher (normalized) price for bad financial decisions than the rest of us because they are already so close to having nothing.
I can sympathize because clearly they're getting a shitty deal out of life, and I'm aware of various possible explanations as to why somebody with no money might want to buy expensive goods, but I can't really do empathy because the phenomenon is basically mysterious and counterintuitive to me.
For example, maybe they don't think much about the future because they feel they have no good future regardless. So they take the hit to ease a little bit of the struggle. My point is that I suspect a lot of the "haters," so to speak, in this thread have never experienced hopelessness in their lives before.
I will tell you just this: I'm disappointed that "poor" can't pick up a sofa from the street for free.
That's what I did when I was poor. Living in a Brooklyn basement with roaches on minimal wage, straight from the plane, barely speaking English.
These guys aren't poor. Poor don't buy new $1,500 sofas. Heck, right know with kid and wife and combined income close to $200k I don't have $1,500 sofa as there are better ways to spend (invest) money. My sofa is from Ikea, got it in 2007 for about $1,000.
They are stupid.
The question is why is the issue so widespread? Why are these RTB businesses making such a killing exploiting a behavior that has become increasingly massive in the 7 years since the recession started? What is so screwed up in American society that the lower class families which should be saving up and making careful purchasing decisions to improve their lot in life, are instead throwing themselves at the wolves' mouths?
Maybe if we all here just laughed loud enough so other poor could hear it, maybe then it would be just unacceptable for them to do stupid things like this. Maybe, if they knew the society will not care if they waste $4k, they would be much more cautious. Maybe, other poor, need an example, so they don't do stuff like that. Maybe strong families, churches - shouldn't have been targeted for destruction. Because maybe they could help them.
Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place.
And this story above is a classic example.
As you will observe, HN is throughly infected with the communist delusion, commonly observed with atheist intelectuals. People like us, who escaped communist shitholes, after having to witness how it degenerates whole societies like a cancer and therefore being allergic to the false "but but but we have to help!" siren call, will be attacked by the infected often for merely loudly pronouncing the word "communism", which the rabid marxists are trying to cover up like the plague.
After escaping to the west precisely to escape the social trainwrecks caused by the communist fallacy, it is so sad having to watch the new home going down the same damn way as if they didnt have basically the rest of the planet as a cautionary tale.