Dearest Rachel –
It was a week and a half ago when Lars and I wrapped up our usual walk through the woods with lunch at our favorite gyro place (they make their own in-house – and you can really tell the difference from one of those places that use the commercial providers like Kronos or Olympus – while still charging comparable prices for their wares). Since it was my turn to pay, I got out my wallet, and as I looked at their payment options, I could barely keep from laughing.
It was enough for Lars to notice, and he was a bit puzzled at my reaction. “What’s so funny?”
I thought it might be rude to mention it right at the counter, so as I was getting the cash out of my wallet, I demurred on answering his question; “I’ll tell you when we get to our table.” And I meant to filling him in, really I did, but we got caught up in several other subjects, and I never got around to explaining myself. And at this point, it would probably be too insignificant a thing to try to explain until such time as we return there.
But you see, along with the usual cash and credit options, their register was advertising that patrons would soon be able to pay for their meal in four easy installments through a company called Klarna. It’s a Swedish-based outfit that specializes in allowing people to electronically pay for purchases on the installment plan. Which is all well and good for certain large purchases, I guess, but the idea of paying for a meal on the installment plan strikes me as so ridiculous as to be funny. Putting off payment until the end of the month on a credit card is one thing, but paying for something as ephemeral as lunch over four months – and having to pay interest on the transaction by design – is so awful as to be funny. If you can’t afford a thing now, why pay that much more for it over time?
Growing up with your parents, I’m sure you can understand my bemusement. They taught you well not to pay for something later when you could pay for it now. In fact, they took such a dim view of credit in any of its forms that they never used it. Although… that’s not being entirely fair to them; your mom was fully prepared to take out a mortgage when she was building the house she designed – and eventually became your childhood home – it’s just that the builders working on it took so long (and prices were so low in that area) that she was able to keep up with the installments as they completed various phases of the project. By the time they finished building it, she’d finished paying for the work.
But as for consumer credit, they had no use for it. In fact, both of us were amused when they were shopping at some big box department store and were offered a free gift if they were to sign up for the store credit card. At this point, they saw no problem with doing so, as they had no intention of using the card beyond this one time, and whatever it was the store was offering was something they were interested in. So they filled out and submitted the paperwork… only to be rejected by the store’s credit department because they had no credit history. They were worth more than most people in their town, but because they didn’t use credit, they couldn’t get it if they wanted to. Which, apart from not being able to get the gift offered them (and not wanting it enough to actually buy it), was generally fine with them.
Of course, I never had that problem with such stuff, but when I use a credit card, I make a point of paying it off when I get the bill. It’s just more convenient to pay all these expenditures at one time at the end of a month, rather than to constantly lay out cash for every transaction. But I’m not about to have to deal with interest or penalties for making late payments, or letting balances ride. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m proud of my credit rating, but it’s nice to have it when it’s needed.
So just a couple of days ago, I got a series of letters from this Klarna company in the mail. Had I only gotten one, I would probably have thrown it away as an advertisement for a service I had no intention of using. But receiving three at once seemed a bit weird for an ad campaign, so I opened them up.
It was a good thing I did, as they weren’t promoting their service, but thanking me for using it, as well as sending me details of their terms of service and the loan payment plant for various purchases ‘I’d’ made through them at Walmart. Now, despite the place being a little more than a couple of miles away (closer than the one in your childhood town, anyway), I almost never shop at Walmart; I generally prefer the Meijer a little further beyond, for reasons I can’t quite explain, although you and I shared this preference going back years. So this was mildly concerning, especially since, between the three transactions, ‘I’ had apparently racked up purchases of about fifteen hundred dollars from there, to be automatically deducted from a certain debit card of mine (whose digits I didn’t recognize) over the course of the next twelve to eighteen months.
Now, this is penny-ante stuff these days, and theoretically, this wouldn’t be draining any of my bank accounts as the debit card didn’t seem to be connected to me in any way, shape or form. But the fact that it was out there – and somehow connected to me – suggested that this could keep going on if I didn’t do something about it; it might damage my credit rating going forward (not that I can imagine need it much).
Thankfully, the documents included contact information on the company, although the website directed me to a phone number instead. And after maybe about twenty minutes on the phone – mostly spent in a queue or otherwise on hold, but that’s par for the course for such things (during which time I was dealing with the laundry I mentioned yesterday) – the girl on the other hand was able to cancel both the transactions themselves and the account ‘I’ had apparently set up with them. She did this so efficiently and matter-of-factly that I’d assume this was a regular occurrence for them; which, while speaking well for their customer service, doesn’t recommend their security and screening protocols very highly.
Bottom line, I can’t say that I endorse the use of this system for paying for anything. I could understand an installment plan for big purchases, like furniture and automobiles (and if you can get a plan that allows you to escape interest if you pay promptly, all the better), but for the smaller things that this company seems to cover, that strikes me as a very bad idea. Add to that the fact that they seem to be a nexus for fraud (although that may not be their fault, but that they’re just a vehicle for driving it), and I can’t speak very highly of it, other than that they’re very willing to cancel it when it’s called out. It was certainly an easier process than you related to me about dealing with, say, Amazon (although, in that case, we ended up keeping the merchandise we never ordered – here, I never saw anything in terms of product).
As always, I realize that the things of this world no longer matter to you where you are, but I suspect that these stories might amuse you all the same, particularly given our mutual attitudes towards such outfits, and the fact that once again, they’ve been shown to be a little sketchy. Still, it’s the sketchy stuff that make for better word pictures, and if they come to one unbidden, one might as well talk about them, eh?
In any event, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck, as it’s clear that I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 