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Food is a basic human need, paying someone to make a burrito for you and then hand deliver it to your house is not. There is no shortage of food in america. In

Food is a basic human need, paying someone to make a burrito for you and then hand deliver it to your house is not. There is no shortage of food in america. In brazil, many people don’t eat meat because it’s too expensive, and get the vast majority of their calories from beans and rice. you can also do this in america, but almost no one does outside of college students because food is cheap enough relative to wages that people can generally afford to eat a wide variety of foods. The bigger problem with BNPL, in my view, is that a lot of people are not able to understand the concept of credit. I knew people in my hometown who got a credit card, and their reaction to having a $3k credit limit was the exact same as if they had gotten $3k deposited into their bank account. I’m honestly not sure whether they understood that they didn’t just randomly get given $3k. I saw this happen multiple times. But it sounds very patronizing to say the “there’s a lot of poor people who don’t understand credit, so we need to prevent them from having access to any so they don’t get the chance to screw themselves”, so I understand why no one does.

shermantanktop 1y ago
“Fear of sounding patronizing” sounds like a cocktail party problem. If that’s stopping someone - being made fun of by another member of their elite class - that’s a recipe for failure.
- akoboldfrying 1y ago
  Being careful not to sound patronising towards the poor in public is one of the most ironclad unstated rules of wealthy social groups in the West. Breaking it immediately reveals one to be a member of the outgroup ("gauche"/"nouveau riche"/"tasteless"/"a philistine"), which will cause other wealthy people to break ties for fear of being tarnished by association. Since relationships with other wealthy people are a cornerstone of becoming and remaining wealthy, there is a massive incentive not to do this. I think the underlying reason is that being patronised is very antagonising, and the poor generally outnumber the rich, who must ultimately depend on them in a variety of ways.
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    Exactly, perfectly put. It becomes an ingroup code, with very little to do with the actual people that are being discussed. But if people want to have a serious conversation, it’s intellectually dishonest to steer around topics in that way. That’s how you end up with clueless policies.
wronglebowski 1y ago
I agree entirely with this sentiment. It almost feels like it's our ages "Keeping up with the Joneses". Even if 30-50% of your social circle can afford it without incurring debt if it becomes the social norm we'll all keep doing it. It's unfortunate but I don't know how this generation learns this lesson.
- phyzix5761 1y ago
  Because its driven by something that transcends generations: human desire. Its a very powerful emotion that drives us to act (as is aversion). But, we can train ourselves not to react to this emotion and over time it does become weaker and, eventually, completely subsides. It does take time and practice though which most people are not willing to put in because they don't see desire as a problem.
nkrisc 1y ago
There are many, many stupid people who would benefit from being protected from themselves. How far down that path we want to walk as a society is an eternal debate.
- cryptonector 1y ago
  There is "protecting them from themselves" and then there is "protecting them from loan sharks who predate on their stupidity".
  - jhanschoo 1y ago
    I don't quite understand the full argument that you are trying to make. You seem to assume that it is more justified to "protect someone from themselves" than to "protect stupid people from loan sharks", and that the situation at hand resembles the latter more than the former. To me the justifiability of these two imperatives seem to be reversed. But to the extent that "protecting stupid people from loan sharks" is unjustified, we also think that we should "protect weak people from robbers and bandits", and protect people from frauds.
    - cryptonector 1y ago
      > You seem to assume that it is more justified to "protect someone from themselves" than to "protect stupid people from loan sharks", and that the situation at hand resembles the latter more than the former. I meant the opposite.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  But sadly also a lot of not-stupid people who sometimes need to (or would benefit to) borrow on short notice, and it's better that they're doing that on a credit card with protections and that they can pay off. I've been both: easy credit in my youth ended up with me racking up a lot of silly debt that I had to spend several years living frugally to pay off, but also now that I'm much more financially secure, having some credit cards that work as a very cheap line of credit if I'm having a liquidity crunch is also very useful.
poincaredisk 1y ago
Why only poor though? There's plenty of middle class people living above their means by abusing credit too. They can deal with the consequences better, but it's equally financially harmful for them
- thanksgiving 1y ago
  There is really no such thing as a middle class though. We are all n missed paychecks away from being unhoused.
  - adrianN 1y ago
    The value of n is pretty important in the discussion.
  - tomjen3 1y ago
    No. If we end up missing one or more paycheques we will look for another job. If we do lose our home we will be ideal renters. Not that that will happen because we will find another job before this.
  - dani__german 1y ago
    middle class has shrunk only because the upper class has expanded. Every American citizen living with property taxes is n missed payments from homelessness. unhoused is a misnomer, especially in this context of losing your home.
    - SirMaster 1y ago
      What if you have passive income though? Like my passive income from the rental properties that I party own/invest in more than cover my own rent (or mortgage) and food costs.
  - SirMaster 1y ago
    >We are all n missed paychecks away from being unhoused. So If I am years of missed paychecks away from being unhoused and unfed, what does that make me?
walrus01 1y ago
> Food is a basic human need, paying someone to make a burrito for you and then hand deliver it to your house is not. There is no shortage of food in america. Do some googling about what is a "food desert", plenty of lower income people in the USA live somewhere that the grocery store options and fresh, nutritious ingredient shopping options are VERY poor. Or a costly distance away to drive on a regular basis. I am not saying this excuses ordering $25 burritos on doordash or uber eats but it is an influencing factor.
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  The lack of food can be explained either by a shortage of demand or a shortage of supply. Many people assume that the demand is there and the supply is the problem - people are desperate for healthy food but no one wants to sell it to them for some reason (the reason is always left unsaid). Instead, they have no choice but to shop at 7/11. So presumably, as soon as a store selling fresh, nutritious ingredients opens up, it would be swarmed with people buying broccoli and chicken breasts. However there is some evidence that the reason no healthy food is being sold is because people's demand for heathy food is being provided by a supermarket a few miles away, or that they just have little demand for healthy food in the first place. Here is an article with more information: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/december/what-really-happens-when-a-grocery-store-opens-in-a--food-desert.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/decemb...
  - braingravy 1y ago
    It can also be explained by corrupt markets and societal coercion that perpetuate cycles bolstering cooperate profits.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - harrall 1y ago
    To support your point, I live in the complete opposite of a food desert but I know a lot of people who don’t know how to cook… like not really. “Cooking” to them going to Trader’s Joes and buying one of those frozen packs. If I gave them a bunch of chicken breasts and broccoli, they would struggle to make it tasty, even if I told them it load it up with fats and sugars. Cooking — as in being able to make any set of common ingredients tasty, quickly, with few dishes to wash, and without looking up recipes each time — is the skill you need before you can “unlock” supermarkets. If I was still 19 and a new supermarket showed up, I would know f— all to do except browse the frozen section.
lumost 1y ago
Curiously, medieval societies struggled with “usury”. Effectively being a wage earner was a tough game as you might owe rent, have a bad month, or end up overly indebted. Most wage earners eventually became indentured servants or worse. This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent. It’s not just that people don’t understand debt, it’s that the vast majority of people live in precarious situations which make debt a temptation. A little debt to grease transactions and buy assets is good, a lot of debt is a burning crises.
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  >"This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent" There are places where they didn't own anything. Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him. Same in Russia. A couple centuries ago, serfs came with the land. They could be liberated if the owner decided it. However, being a free man is quite difficult without a job.
  - helge9210 1y ago
    Correction: slavery in Russia/Soviet Union ended in 1974 when all the rural residents got passports and with it the right to leave the collective farm and change the profession.
    - catlikesshrimp 1y ago
      Correction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 Serfdom ended in 1861.
      - kspacewalk2 1y ago
        There's a very good argument that, after being abolished in 1861, serfdom was re-introduced in the early 1930s via collectivization. Instead of private ownership of serfs, the state effectively owned the peasants who were bound to their collective farms by a system of meagre food-for-labour payments, needing permission to leave the farm/village for any reason, etc. The peasants that "came with" the collective farms were only issued internal passports in the late 1960s. Anyone who knows anything about life in the USSR understands the implications of having no internal passport. You didn't quite need one to breathe when outside your city/town/village, but just about.
InsideOutSanta 1y ago
> But it sounds very patronizing to say the “there’s a lot of poor people who don’t understand credit, so we need to prevent them from having access to any so they don’t get the chance to screw themselves”, so I understand why no one does. OTOH, the article literally says that "data [shows] that those with lower incomes, lower education, and worse credit (redundancies here) are more likely to use BNPL." Most consumer protection laws are somewhat patronizing, but since you can't be an expert in everything, we need them.
- zipy124 1y ago
  How is that on the other hand? I'm a little confused, as if anything it supports exactly what the person you are replying to was saying as they only mention that they are more likely to use BNPL, it doesn't take the extra step of saying perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to, or should be protected when doing so.
  - InsideOutSanta 1y ago
    I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you're asking me, but I said "on the other hand" because the person I was responding to was concerned about sounding patronizing by pointing out that laws protect uneducated people, while the article outright states that this targets uneducated people. It wasn't intended to introduce a criticism of what the person I was responding to was saying.
    - zipy124 1y ago
      Just to clairfy I'm not assuming you are criticing the commentor, nor am I intending to critisice you, merely that I don't agree the viewpoints are actually that similar at all between the commentor and the article. The article doesn't state they target uneducated people, it states that they use it more which are subtle but key differences. Furthermore "poor people who don’t understand credit" is not the same category as "lower incomes, lower education, and worse credit (redundancies here)". Even if we assume they are the same group of people (by making an equivalence between understanding of credit and general education/income/credit which we know is not a great assumption) the statements are different anyway. The article is talking about an observed statistic, BNPL seems to be more prevalent in lower income, lower education and worse credit populations (we actually have really poor data on private credit so this should be taken with a grain of salt). The commenter however is making the claim that this is because they have a bad understanding of credit, and also implicitily that BNPL is bad and a bad use of credit. These are therefore different as we can easily see for instance that a probable cause could for example be that people with no savings are more likely to borrow to cover spending in-between paychecks for example, or when emergency expenses change their cash-flow. This would not however fit with the commenters viewpoint, and is actually a good use of credit.
bluedino 1y ago
> In brazil, many people don’t eat meat because it’s too expensive During the 2008 recession, I remember a woman who called in to one of the financial advice radio shows (Dave Ramsey?). She was talking about how her husband has been laid off and they were eating beans, tortillas and rice, and how i simply thought, "so you're eating....mexican food?" That said, it's crazy how a burrito is $12 now and a two taco, beans/rice dinner at the generic Mexican restaurants in town is $16. This is peasant food that should be dirt cheap. Even the gray-market facebook food sellers want $12.
- mattmanser 1y ago
  That's also labor and capital costs though, not just raw ingredient costs. It's also a byproduct of minimum wage, the time spent on making the burrito, prepping the kitchen, cleaning up, processing the order, doing the accounts, etc. all adds up meaning a single meal has a minimum cost directly proportional to minimum wage. Though don't get me wrong, minimum wage is an overall good imo. However if we had universal basic income instead, and thus could scrap minimum wage, you might see the price of a burrito drop.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >However if we had universal basic income instead, and thus could scrap minimum wage, you might see the price of a burrito drop. ...at the expense of massive fiscal spending needed to fund the UBI in the first place.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Start taxing capital gains properly and we'll have plenty to fund that.
- mathgeek 1y ago
  > That said, it's crazy how a burrito is $12 now and a two taco, beans/rice dinner at the generic Mexican restaurants in town is $16. Beans, rice, and burritos are still relatively cheap. Labor is not. > This is peasant food that should be dirt cheap. Make it ourselves and it is.

shermantanktop 1y ago

“Fear of sounding patronizing” sounds like a cocktail party problem. If that’s stopping someone - being made fun of by another member of their elite class - that’s a recipe for failure.

akoboldfrying 1y ago
Being careful not to sound patronising towards the poor in public is one of the most ironclad unstated rules of wealthy social groups in the West. Breaking it immediately reveals one to be a member of the outgroup ("gauche"/"nouveau riche"/"tasteless"/"a philistine"), which will cause other wealthy people to break ties for fear of being tarnished by association. Since relationships with other wealthy people are a cornerstone of becoming and remaining wealthy, there is a massive incentive not to do this. I think the underlying reason is that being patronised is very antagonising, and the poor generally outnumber the rich, who must ultimately depend on them in a variety of ways.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  Exactly, perfectly put. It becomes an ingroup code, with very little to do with the actual people that are being discussed. But if people want to have a serious conversation, it’s intellectually dishonest to steer around topics in that way. That’s how you end up with clueless policies.

wronglebowski 1y ago

I agree entirely with this sentiment. It almost feels like it's our ages "Keeping up with the Joneses". Even if 30-50% of your social circle can afford it without incurring debt if it becomes the social norm we'll all keep doing it. It's unfortunate but I don't know how this generation learns this lesson.

phyzix5761 1y ago
Because its driven by something that transcends generations: human desire. Its a very powerful emotion that drives us to act (as is aversion). But, we can train ourselves not to react to this emotion and over time it does become weaker and, eventually, completely subsides. It does take time and practice though which most people are not willing to put in because they don't see desire as a problem.

nkrisc 1y ago

There are many, many stupid people who would benefit from being protected from themselves. How far down that path we want to walk as a society is an eternal debate.

cryptonector 1y ago
There is "protecting them from themselves" and then there is "protecting them from loan sharks who predate on their stupidity".
- jhanschoo 1y ago
  I don't quite understand the full argument that you are trying to make. You seem to assume that it is more justified to "protect someone from themselves" than to "protect stupid people from loan sharks", and that the situation at hand resembles the latter more than the former. To me the justifiability of these two imperatives seem to be reversed. But to the extent that "protecting stupid people from loan sharks" is unjustified, we also think that we should "protect weak people from robbers and bandits", and protect people from frauds.
  - cryptonector 1y ago
    > You seem to assume that it is more justified to "protect someone from themselves" than to "protect stupid people from loan sharks", and that the situation at hand resembles the latter more than the former. I meant the opposite.
petesergeant 1y ago
But sadly also a lot of not-stupid people who sometimes need to (or would benefit to) borrow on short notice, and it's better that they're doing that on a credit card with protections and that they can pay off. I've been both: easy credit in my youth ended up with me racking up a lot of silly debt that I had to spend several years living frugally to pay off, but also now that I'm much more financially secure, having some credit cards that work as a very cheap line of credit if I'm having a liquidity crunch is also very useful.

poincaredisk 1y ago

Why only poor though? There's plenty of middle class people living above their means by abusing credit too. They can deal with the consequences better, but it's equally financially harmful for them

thanksgiving 1y ago
There is really no such thing as a middle class though. We are all n missed paychecks away from being unhoused.
- adrianN 1y ago
  The value of n is pretty important in the discussion.
- tomjen3 1y ago
  No. If we end up missing one or more paycheques we will look for another job. If we do lose our home we will be ideal renters. Not that that will happen because we will find another job before this.
- dani__german 1y ago
  middle class has shrunk only because the upper class has expanded. Every American citizen living with property taxes is n missed payments from homelessness. unhoused is a misnomer, especially in this context of losing your home.
  - SirMaster 1y ago
    What if you have passive income though? Like my passive income from the rental properties that I party own/invest in more than cover my own rent (or mortgage) and food costs.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  >We are all n missed paychecks away from being unhoused. So If I am years of missed paychecks away from being unhoused and unfed, what does that make me?

walrus01 1y ago

> Food is a basic human need, paying someone to make a burrito for you and then hand deliver it to your house is not. There is no shortage of food in america. Do some googling about what is a "food desert", plenty of lower income people in the USA live somewhere that the grocery store options and fresh, nutritious ingredient shopping options are VERY poor. Or a costly distance away to drive on a regular basis. I am not saying this excuses ordering $25 burritos on doordash or uber eats but it is an influencing factor.

ChadNauseam 1y ago
The lack of food can be explained either by a shortage of demand or a shortage of supply. Many people assume that the demand is there and the supply is the problem - people are desperate for healthy food but no one wants to sell it to them for some reason (the reason is always left unsaid). Instead, they have no choice but to shop at 7/11. So presumably, as soon as a store selling fresh, nutritious ingredients opens up, it would be swarmed with people buying broccoli and chicken breasts. However there is some evidence that the reason no healthy food is being sold is because people's demand for heathy food is being provided by a supermarket a few miles away, or that they just have little demand for healthy food in the first place. Here is an article with more information: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/december/what-really-happens-when-a-grocery-store-opens-in-a--food-desert.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/decemb...
- braingravy 1y ago
  It can also be explained by corrupt markets and societal coercion that perpetuate cycles bolstering cooperate profits.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- harrall 1y ago
  To support your point, I live in the complete opposite of a food desert but I know a lot of people who don’t know how to cook… like not really. “Cooking” to them going to Trader’s Joes and buying one of those frozen packs. If I gave them a bunch of chicken breasts and broccoli, they would struggle to make it tasty, even if I told them it load it up with fats and sugars. Cooking — as in being able to make any set of common ingredients tasty, quickly, with few dishes to wash, and without looking up recipes each time — is the skill you need before you can “unlock” supermarkets. If I was still 19 and a new supermarket showed up, I would know f— all to do except browse the frozen section.

lumost 1y ago

Curiously, medieval societies struggled with “usury”. Effectively being a wage earner was a tough game as you might owe rent, have a bad month, or end up overly indebted. Most wage earners eventually became indentured servants or worse. This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent. It’s not just that people don’t understand debt, it’s that the vast majority of people live in precarious situations which make debt a temptation. A little debt to grease transactions and buy assets is good, a lot of debt is a burning crises.

catlikesshrimp 1y ago
>"This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent" There are places where they didn't own anything. Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him. Same in Russia. A couple centuries ago, serfs came with the land. They could be liberated if the owner decided it. However, being a free man is quite difficult without a job.
- helge9210 1y ago
  Correction: slavery in Russia/Soviet Union ended in 1974 when all the rural residents got passports and with it the right to leave the collective farm and change the profession.
  - catlikesshrimp 1y ago
    Correction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 Serfdom ended in 1861.
    - kspacewalk2 1y ago
      There's a very good argument that, after being abolished in 1861, serfdom was re-introduced in the early 1930s via collectivization. Instead of private ownership of serfs, the state effectively owned the peasants who were bound to their collective farms by a system of meagre food-for-labour payments, needing permission to leave the farm/village for any reason, etc. The peasants that "came with" the collective farms were only issued internal passports in the late 1960s. Anyone who knows anything about life in the USSR understands the implications of having no internal passport. You didn't quite need one to breathe when outside your city/town/village, but just about.

InsideOutSanta 1y ago

> But it sounds very patronizing to say the “there’s a lot of poor people who don’t understand credit, so we need to prevent them from having access to any so they don’t get the chance to screw themselves”, so I understand why no one does. OTOH, the article literally says that "data [shows] that those with lower incomes, lower education, and worse credit (redundancies here) are more likely to use BNPL." Most consumer protection laws are somewhat patronizing, but since you can't be an expert in everything, we need them.

zipy124 1y ago
How is that on the other hand? I'm a little confused, as if anything it supports exactly what the person you are replying to was saying as they only mention that they are more likely to use BNPL, it doesn't take the extra step of saying perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to, or should be protected when doing so.
- InsideOutSanta 1y ago
  I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you're asking me, but I said "on the other hand" because the person I was responding to was concerned about sounding patronizing by pointing out that laws protect uneducated people, while the article outright states that this targets uneducated people. It wasn't intended to introduce a criticism of what the person I was responding to was saying.
  - zipy124 1y ago
    Just to clairfy I'm not assuming you are criticing the commentor, nor am I intending to critisice you, merely that I don't agree the viewpoints are actually that similar at all between the commentor and the article. The article doesn't state they target uneducated people, it states that they use it more which are subtle but key differences. Furthermore "poor people who don’t understand credit" is not the same category as "lower incomes, lower education, and worse credit (redundancies here)". Even if we assume they are the same group of people (by making an equivalence between understanding of credit and general education/income/credit which we know is not a great assumption) the statements are different anyway. The article is talking about an observed statistic, BNPL seems to be more prevalent in lower income, lower education and worse credit populations (we actually have really poor data on private credit so this should be taken with a grain of salt). The commenter however is making the claim that this is because they have a bad understanding of credit, and also implicitily that BNPL is bad and a bad use of credit. These are therefore different as we can easily see for instance that a probable cause could for example be that people with no savings are more likely to borrow to cover spending in-between paychecks for example, or when emergency expenses change their cash-flow. This would not however fit with the commenters viewpoint, and is actually a good use of credit.

bluedino 1y ago

> In brazil, many people don’t eat meat because it’s too expensive During the 2008 recession, I remember a woman who called in to one of the financial advice radio shows (Dave Ramsey?). She was talking about how her husband has been laid off and they were eating beans, tortillas and rice, and how i simply thought, "so you're eating....mexican food?" That said, it's crazy how a burrito is $12 now and a two taco, beans/rice dinner at the generic Mexican restaurants in town is $16. This is peasant food that should be dirt cheap. Even the gray-market facebook food sellers want $12.

mattmanser 1y ago
That's also labor and capital costs though, not just raw ingredient costs. It's also a byproduct of minimum wage, the time spent on making the burrito, prepping the kitchen, cleaning up, processing the order, doing the accounts, etc. all adds up meaning a single meal has a minimum cost directly proportional to minimum wage. Though don't get me wrong, minimum wage is an overall good imo. However if we had universal basic income instead, and thus could scrap minimum wage, you might see the price of a burrito drop.
- gruez 1y ago
  >However if we had universal basic income instead, and thus could scrap minimum wage, you might see the price of a burrito drop. ...at the expense of massive fiscal spending needed to fund the UBI in the first place.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Start taxing capital gains properly and we'll have plenty to fund that.
mathgeek 1y ago
> That said, it's crazy how a burrito is $12 now and a two taco, beans/rice dinner at the generic Mexican restaurants in town is $16. Beans, rice, and burritos are still relatively cheap. Labor is not. > This is peasant food that should be dirt cheap. Make it ourselves and it is.