5 ms·

Financing My Klarna Doritos Locos Taco

76 points by theahura 1y ago

DiscourseFan 1y ago
The point of crypto is not "breaking the rules." Bitcoin might be inefficient but its mostly used as a reserve currency these days. Crypto in general, however, is the first currency that is backed neither by its cult value (gold) nor the military and economic strength of the country that prints it (USD), but entirely by technological foundations itself. It is revolutionary, if also very power inefficient. It is effectively reducing the role of the state to an intermediary regulatory body as technology continues to advance to the point where such civil laws are not required. Of course the corporation, as an entity, will come to dominate the world, but that is the natural progression of history and can also be overcome through social and political movements. But not before the state itself, as a political entity, is effectively dissolved.
- rekttrader 1y ago
  Crypto is the first viable non-nation state currency. It’s NeoCurrency and frankly it’s high time something like it should exist.
- hellisothers 1y ago
  Every person I’ve ever met who espouses “crypto” sounds like they’re in a cult trying to recruit new members. I can’t recall meeting a person who uses crypto who when asked about it (if they didn’t bring it up first) treated it like “oh, yea, crypto, it’s whatever, you just use it or don’t”.
  - rekttrader 1y ago
    Have you tried doing an ACH to a friend or paid rent that way recently? Banks force you to Zelle (there are daily/weekly limits) they’re not enough to cover modern rents so you breakup payments. Meanwhile any stable coin transfer can be done in minutes and works better than any payment rail ever. Edit: I got my landlord to open a Coinbase account because stablecoin payments are way easier (also got a signup bonus for referring a new account)
    - malnourish 1y ago
      My living partner transfers me money via ACH each month to share our expenses. It's effectively instant.
      - dmoy 1y ago
        ACH isn't instant, but if you use the same bank they may use something besides ACH to affect the transfer. ACH is... FTPing around flat files, at some point in the day. Or the next day. Plus time for clearing. FedNow is closer to instant
        otterley 1y ago
        For the purpose of making rent payments, it doesn't matter.
      - chews 1y ago
        You've undoubtedly done this before the IRS/Treasury $600 dollar reporting requirements... try to do this with someone new.
    - everythingctl 1y ago
      Pretty much every other developed country has solved this problem without having to transact in digital lottery tickets.
      - xethos 1y ago
        Yes and no. I can eTransfer in Canada... to a limit of $2,000 CAD daily. Rent is $2,100, so parent's point stands. I could upgrade my cellphone and use Google Play Services, allowing up to $10,000 CAD daily, but I have no intention of doing so. I think it's messed up to tie my financial and digital sovereignty to a foreign corporation, I don't appreciate the hit to battery life, privacy, and the pre-requisite bump in hardware to run GApps, and I simply don't want to end up on the spending treadmill for new cellphones. Canada "solved" this, but the limits haven't kept up with inflation or life in general
  - solumos 1y ago
    We should meet.
- burkaman 1y ago
  How is it not backed by its cult value? It's the same as gold, only valuable if enough people agree that it's valuable. The technical foundations make it cool to think about, but not valuable without a large community of like-minded people.
  - IlikeKitties 1y ago
    Gold has at least some value outside of "cult value" since it has industrial and decorative use.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - c0balt 1y ago
      Gold also has the nice property that it "just works", it will be there without electricity or an uplink to some network
  - georgemcbay 1y ago
    Crypto actually has all of the same fundamental flaws the person you are replying to claims it liberates people from, they just take slightly different forms. As you mentioned, like any currency its worth whatever people collectively believe that its worth and nothing more. And on top of that, while it may not be tied to a singular government like the USD, it is heavily tied to being used in a place with operational telecomm and electricity infrastructure, which requires a functional societal order that the "military and economic strength" the original reply was talking about provides.
- theahura 1y ago
  Hi, author here. You should probably read my quoted post about crypto, which comes out ambivalently positive on the whole thing (https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/tech-things-the-point-of-crypto-is?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5sutf https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/tech-things-the-poi...)
firesteelrain 1y ago
Klarna and other companies like it will reject the temp credit card situation. But nothing they can do if you cancel your debit card and close your bank account. Given the trouble that takes, they probably figure the risk is low
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  I just checked and they accept cards from privacy.com. Funny enough they do not accept my Chase Sapphire or Amex.
eek2121 1y ago
To OP: This is not a crypto issue, and many of us not obsessed with the subject like me will get annoyed to see it being brought up. You speak true of the subject matter, however. Except for Klarna, I had good credit (the last time I applied, score FICO was 720 with strong payment history (no negatives, a decade of history of good credit, near and/or zero balances, and a quarter million of personal income) and they wouldn't lend me a dime (I asked for like $100 or something...literally could not be bothered to find my wallet, get my card out, and find the 3 digit number on the back...I also figured it'd be neat to have a new line of credit). I suspect they have some other odd model for tracking you, and if they can't, they reject, so it is likely not as bad as you think. It's probably much worse. ;)
- andwur 1y ago
  You likely ran into anti-fraud provisions with that scenario, specifically identity theft prevention. Having worked at a similar business for years, a trend for high fraud occurrence is squeaky clean credit file-high income applying for low value credit. These have a well above average occurrence of identity theft cases, presumably because the guaranteed affordability test pass combined with low value makes it easy to get the loan and subsequently unlikely anyone will bother to chase it when they identify it as fraudulent. It's easier, and cheaper, as a provider to just reject all originating accounts in this scenario. Similar to applying for a mortgage: if your credit parameters vastly mismatch your affordability you will get a LOT more questions asked.
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    I guess this is a weird corollary to "the ideal amount of fraud is nonzero" - things that look like a sure bet are actually far more risky.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
dathery 1y ago
An interesting thing to understand about Klarna and other buy-now-pay-later products is that a major part of their profit is the very high merchant fees they charge; retailers have to pay ~2-4x what they do for credit cards if they want to offer Klarna. 57% of Klarna's profit comes from these merchant fees compared to just 24% from loan interest [1]. It turns out it's worth it to merchants because when you're not paying now, you end up buying more than you would otherwise. Order sizes are ~15% higher [2]. Probably similar to how it hurts more to pay with cash than debit because it's so tangible. I view it kinda similar to gambling apps with their endlessly optimized special offers designed to exploit the human monkey brain. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/how-does-klarna-make-money/ https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/how-does... [2] https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/the-leap/klarna-seeks-growth-in-small-business https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/the-leap/klarna-se...
- varispeed 1y ago
  It's interesting psychology. You can do buy now, pay later + get it later without Klarna. Just go to checkout, divide the sum by how many instalments you want to pay. Then open your banking app, setup a monthly transfer for that instalment to savings account, setup reminder in 3-6 months, then in 3-6 months just buy it. Just few more steps, but for a human it's more attractive to get item now and feel the pain later, rather than the other way around. That's how they make money.
  - notpushkin 1y ago
    If you do have money, it also means that you get item now and keep your money invested. If it’s the sort of BNPL that has no fees as long as you pay on time (not sure if Klarna does that, but I’ve seen a lot of those), technically it’s better to always use that.
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      Technically, yeah, but the overall benefit is pretty small. If you average $x/BNPL period, you're dealing with the cognitive/time overhead of buying everything with BNPL for the reward of whatever investment return you can get on $x. For an average household, that might be like a hundred bucks per year on average?
jjangkke 1y ago
What is the upside to Klarna when they let you pay in installments with 0% interest ?
- etchalon 1y ago
  The merchant fees they collect.
- resonious 1y ago
  These installments likely don't cost Klarna any extra. You can play games with the credit card authorization system to simulate installments without incurring extra fees. Then Klarna has their own middleman fee like any other payment gateway, and it's very high despite the lack of extra cost.
  - naniwaduni 1y ago
    4 instalments spaced by 2 weeks with the first up-front averages out to about a 3-week float, which is less than the grace period on ordinary consumer credit cards in the US. And Klarna charges merchants more for this!
sanktanglia 1y ago
I stopped reading after "regulations cause more harm than good"
- theahura 1y ago
  That's not the quote. The quote is "Much of that regulation may do more harm than good, but our legislative system moves slowly and favors doing nothing over doing something" Which is much more trivially true than your incorrect reading of it. I think you should read the rest of the article, because it is mostly positive on regulation. The whole article is about why Klarna being a credit company while trying to dodge credit regulation is a _bad_ thing
  - fogzen 1y ago
    > Which is much more trivially true than your incorrect reading of it. What “much of that regulation” do you believe does more harm than good?
    - theahura 1y ago
      I have my own list, but the larger point is that it may do more harm than good; we never check or evaluate it!
hibikir 1y ago
The description of the whole "copy something, but ignore the regulation" scheme is missing the most important part: Make sure that the extra risk you are undertaking be eaten by someone else, while you get most of the upside of the bet. It's not even tech related at that point: It's also how synthetic CDOs were supposed to work for those issuing them in the financial crisis. If your innovation is only to eat the risk that before was illegal, then you are taking a gamble with is unlikely to pay off. It's also why private equity is using loans from third parties as part of their purchases: if the company they bought goes under because the fees were too high, or the intervention was too aggressive, the loan goes into default, and they didn't make the loan, so it's someone else's problem. Most crypto schemes end up like that too: The issuer offloads much of the risk. What is the real wonder of tokenized shares in a startup, if not for the venture capitalist to be able to offload risks into unsophisticated investors well before an IPO? Any place that is creating bonus risk is sticking most of it to someone else, capturing just the upside. If Klarna wants to have a chance, it has to charge a whole lot more fees to the merchant, and then find a way to offload as much of the credit risk as possible, probably doing some kind of complicated scheme to make others underestimate the risk. Otherwise they are just WeWork, grabbing pennies in front of a steam roller until a bad recession destroys them.
kevinsync 1y ago
I cannot for the life of me find the article that explains this succinctly and with a hint of salience, but I recall reading sometime this year about how Klarna (a Swedish company) created the concept, in part, because the Swedish (culturally) tend to pay back their loans. It was a hit in its motherland, with little fraud and generally-responsible users. Then they went worldwide, in particular in America where we are a pack of jokers and heathens who are happy to finance a Crave Case and a vape with no intention of paying it back ever. It apparently never occurred to them that we are like this.
- eddythompson80 1y ago
  Cute story, but do you think a massive company that specializes in loans and credit would move to the largest credit market in the world with a 100 years of very detailed financial data and models about loans, delinquencies, defaults, bankruptcies, etc but “it never occurred to them” to check that?
  - kevinsync 1y ago
    I mean, that was the literal whole point of the article, that they were culturally caught off guard. It happens! I'm going to try to find it again and edit this with a link.
    - jjj123 1y ago
      How does that account for the disgusting klarna ads I see in NYC that glorify buying things you cannot afford? Either they got over their shock fast and learned how to take advantage of us, or it was the plan all along.
    - eddythompson80 1y ago
      I’m not doubting the existence of such article. I’m asking you to engage some critical thinking and not accept whatever cute, PR or otherwise “fun” narrative you read anywhere. It’s “fun” to think that Starbucks struggles in Italy is because they are dumb and didn’t realize that Italians have a long cultural tradition with coffee that’s very different than Americans. “Oh dumb Americans and dumb Starbucks. How stupid are they to try to sell espresso in the land of espresso lol”. You need to engage just a little bit of critical thinking and realize that Starbucks knew that well in advance and thought the would give it a shot anyway. Maybe they could occupy a different cultural niche just like they did in dozens of other countries with similarly rich cultural traditions around coffeeshops and coffee or tea like the Middle East and Asia.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ipsum2 1y ago
That was a fun read, but the author never actually buys a taco with Klarna from what I can tell.
- catlover76 1y ago
  [dead]
- naniwaduni 1y ago
  The fact that the author has never actually bought a taco with Klarna pretty clearly detracts from the article, even, in that they really don't seem to have any idea how the other half interacts with financial services.
- theahura 1y ago
  I really should have bought a taco with klarna, mea culpa. It definitely would have made the article better
Terr_ 1y ago
> convince everyone that this is beeblebrox and therefore the previous rules don’t apply. This reminds me of how services like Realpage have been described as "algorithmic price-fixing." There's something traditionally illegal (but profitable), and people try to get away with it by slapping on "but with a computer" as some kind of twist that's supposed to make it OK. Sometimes there's a POSIWID [0] aspect to it, where the excuse is "no human explicitly designed the system to do X from the ground up"... which is a distraction from "we kept shopping around and tweaking until it started to do X and then we decided to make that a core part of our business." That might be a defense against mens rea, but once someone points out that you created a crime-machine by accident, you still gotta fix it or turn it off. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
dangus 1y ago
The article doesn’t mention it directly but as they alluded to, all these buy now pay later companies are bleeding money, which is kind of impressive in itself. Delinquency rates are very high, and there isn’t much recourse for them when someone decides not to pay.

76 points by theahura 1y ago

The point of crypto is not "breaking the rules." Bitcoin might be inefficient but its mostly used as a reserve currency these days. Crypto in general, however, is the first currency that is backed neither by its cult value (gold) nor the military and economic strength of the country that prints it (USD), but entirely by technological foundations itself. It is revolutionary, if also very power inefficient. It is effectively reducing the role of the state to an intermediary regulatory body as technology continues to advance to the point where such civil laws are not required. Of course the corporation, as an entity, will come to dominate the world, but that is the natural progression of history and can also be overcome through social and political movements. But not before the state itself, as a political entity, is effectively dissolved.

rekttrader 1y ago
Crypto is the first viable non-nation state currency. It’s NeoCurrency and frankly it’s high time something like it should exist.
hellisothers 1y ago
Every person I’ve ever met who espouses “crypto” sounds like they’re in a cult trying to recruit new members. I can’t recall meeting a person who uses crypto who when asked about it (if they didn’t bring it up first) treated it like “oh, yea, crypto, it’s whatever, you just use it or don’t”.
- rekttrader 1y ago
  Have you tried doing an ACH to a friend or paid rent that way recently? Banks force you to Zelle (there are daily/weekly limits) they’re not enough to cover modern rents so you breakup payments. Meanwhile any stable coin transfer can be done in minutes and works better than any payment rail ever. Edit: I got my landlord to open a Coinbase account because stablecoin payments are way easier (also got a signup bonus for referring a new account)
  - malnourish 1y ago
    My living partner transfers me money via ACH each month to share our expenses. It's effectively instant.
    - dmoy 1y ago
      ACH isn't instant, but if you use the same bank they may use something besides ACH to affect the transfer. ACH is... FTPing around flat files, at some point in the day. Or the next day. Plus time for clearing. FedNow is closer to instant
      - otterley 1y ago
        For the purpose of making rent payments, it doesn't matter.
    - chews 1y ago
      You've undoubtedly done this before the IRS/Treasury $600 dollar reporting requirements... try to do this with someone new.
  - everythingctl 1y ago
    Pretty much every other developed country has solved this problem without having to transact in digital lottery tickets.
    - xethos 1y ago
      Yes and no. I can eTransfer in Canada... to a limit of $2,000 CAD daily. Rent is $2,100, so parent's point stands. I could upgrade my cellphone and use Google Play Services, allowing up to $10,000 CAD daily, but I have no intention of doing so. I think it's messed up to tie my financial and digital sovereignty to a foreign corporation, I don't appreciate the hit to battery life, privacy, and the pre-requisite bump in hardware to run GApps, and I simply don't want to end up on the spending treadmill for new cellphones. Canada "solved" this, but the limits haven't kept up with inflation or life in general
- solumos 1y ago
  We should meet.
burkaman 1y ago
How is it not backed by its cult value? It's the same as gold, only valuable if enough people agree that it's valuable. The technical foundations make it cool to think about, but not valuable without a large community of like-minded people.
- IlikeKitties 1y ago
  Gold has at least some value outside of "cult value" since it has industrial and decorative use.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - c0balt 1y ago
    Gold also has the nice property that it "just works", it will be there without electricity or an uplink to some network
- georgemcbay 1y ago
  Crypto actually has all of the same fundamental flaws the person you are replying to claims it liberates people from, they just take slightly different forms. As you mentioned, like any currency its worth whatever people collectively believe that its worth and nothing more. And on top of that, while it may not be tied to a singular government like the USD, it is heavily tied to being used in a place with operational telecomm and electricity infrastructure, which requires a functional societal order that the "military and economic strength" the original reply was talking about provides.
theahura 1y ago
Hi, author here. You should probably read my quoted post about crypto, which comes out ambivalently positive on the whole thing (https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/tech-things-the-point-of-crypto-is?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5sutf https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/tech-things-the-poi...)

firesteelrain 1y ago

Klarna and other companies like it will reject the temp credit card situation. But nothing they can do if you cancel your debit card and close your bank account. Given the trouble that takes, they probably figure the risk is low

teaearlgraycold 1y ago
I just checked and they accept cards from privacy.com. Funny enough they do not accept my Chase Sapphire or Amex.

eek2121 1y ago

To OP: This is not a crypto issue, and many of us not obsessed with the subject like me will get annoyed to see it being brought up. You speak true of the subject matter, however. Except for Klarna, I had good credit (the last time I applied, score FICO was 720 with strong payment history (no negatives, a decade of history of good credit, near and/or zero balances, and a quarter million of personal income) and they wouldn't lend me a dime (I asked for like $100 or something...literally could not be bothered to find my wallet, get my card out, and find the 3 digit number on the back...I also figured it'd be neat to have a new line of credit). I suspect they have some other odd model for tracking you, and if they can't, they reject, so it is likely not as bad as you think. It's probably much worse. ;)

andwur 1y ago
You likely ran into anti-fraud provisions with that scenario, specifically identity theft prevention. Having worked at a similar business for years, a trend for high fraud occurrence is squeaky clean credit file-high income applying for low value credit. These have a well above average occurrence of identity theft cases, presumably because the guaranteed affordability test pass combined with low value makes it easy to get the loan and subsequently unlikely anyone will bother to chase it when they identify it as fraudulent. It's easier, and cheaper, as a provider to just reject all originating accounts in this scenario. Similar to applying for a mortgage: if your credit parameters vastly mismatch your affordability you will get a LOT more questions asked.
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  I guess this is a weird corollary to "the ideal amount of fraud is nonzero" - things that look like a sure bet are actually far more risky.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

dathery 1y ago

An interesting thing to understand about Klarna and other buy-now-pay-later products is that a major part of their profit is the very high merchant fees they charge; retailers have to pay ~2-4x what they do for credit cards if they want to offer Klarna. 57% of Klarna's profit comes from these merchant fees compared to just 24% from loan interest [1]. It turns out it's worth it to merchants because when you're not paying now, you end up buying more than you would otherwise. Order sizes are ~15% higher [2]. Probably similar to how it hurts more to pay with cash than debit because it's so tangible. I view it kinda similar to gambling apps with their endlessly optimized special offers designed to exploit the human monkey brain. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/how-does-klarna-make-money/ https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/how-does... [2] https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/the-leap/klarna-seeks-growth-in-small-business https://www.uschamber.com/co/good-company/the-leap/klarna-se...

varispeed 1y ago
It's interesting psychology. You can do buy now, pay later + get it later without Klarna. Just go to checkout, divide the sum by how many instalments you want to pay. Then open your banking app, setup a monthly transfer for that instalment to savings account, setup reminder in 3-6 months, then in 3-6 months just buy it. Just few more steps, but for a human it's more attractive to get item now and feel the pain later, rather than the other way around. That's how they make money.
- notpushkin 1y ago
  If you do have money, it also means that you get item now and keep your money invested. If it’s the sort of BNPL that has no fees as long as you pay on time (not sure if Klarna does that, but I’ve seen a lot of those), technically it’s better to always use that.
  - Marsymars 1y ago
    Technically, yeah, but the overall benefit is pretty small. If you average $x/BNPL period, you're dealing with the cognitive/time overhead of buying everything with BNPL for the reward of whatever investment return you can get on $x. For an average household, that might be like a hundred bucks per year on average?

jjangkke 1y ago

What is the upside to Klarna when they let you pay in installments with 0% interest ?

etchalon 1y ago
The merchant fees they collect.
resonious 1y ago
These installments likely don't cost Klarna any extra. You can play games with the credit card authorization system to simulate installments without incurring extra fees. Then Klarna has their own middleman fee like any other payment gateway, and it's very high despite the lack of extra cost.
- naniwaduni 1y ago
  4 instalments spaced by 2 weeks with the first up-front averages out to about a 3-week float, which is less than the grace period on ordinary consumer credit cards in the US. And Klarna charges merchants more for this!

sanktanglia 1y ago

I stopped reading after "regulations cause more harm than good"

theahura 1y ago
That's not the quote. The quote is "Much of that regulation may do more harm than good, but our legislative system moves slowly and favors doing nothing over doing something" Which is much more trivially true than your incorrect reading of it. I think you should read the rest of the article, because it is mostly positive on regulation. The whole article is about why Klarna being a credit company while trying to dodge credit regulation is a _bad_ thing
- fogzen 1y ago
  > Which is much more trivially true than your incorrect reading of it. What “much of that regulation” do you believe does more harm than good?
  - theahura 1y ago
    I have my own list, but the larger point is that it may do more harm than good; we never check or evaluate it!

hibikir 1y ago

The description of the whole "copy something, but ignore the regulation" scheme is missing the most important part: Make sure that the extra risk you are undertaking be eaten by someone else, while you get most of the upside of the bet. It's not even tech related at that point: It's also how synthetic CDOs were supposed to work for those issuing them in the financial crisis. If your innovation is only to eat the risk that before was illegal, then you are taking a gamble with is unlikely to pay off. It's also why private equity is using loans from third parties as part of their purchases: if the company they bought goes under because the fees were too high, or the intervention was too aggressive, the loan goes into default, and they didn't make the loan, so it's someone else's problem. Most crypto schemes end up like that too: The issuer offloads much of the risk. What is the real wonder of tokenized shares in a startup, if not for the venture capitalist to be able to offload risks into unsophisticated investors well before an IPO? Any place that is creating bonus risk is sticking most of it to someone else, capturing just the upside. If Klarna wants to have a chance, it has to charge a whole lot more fees to the merchant, and then find a way to offload as much of the credit risk as possible, probably doing some kind of complicated scheme to make others underestimate the risk. Otherwise they are just WeWork, grabbing pennies in front of a steam roller until a bad recession destroys them.

kevinsync 1y ago

I cannot for the life of me find the article that explains this succinctly and with a hint of salience, but I recall reading sometime this year about how Klarna (a Swedish company) created the concept, in part, because the Swedish (culturally) tend to pay back their loans. It was a hit in its motherland, with little fraud and generally-responsible users. Then they went worldwide, in particular in America where we are a pack of jokers and heathens who are happy to finance a Crave Case and a vape with no intention of paying it back ever. It apparently never occurred to them that we are like this.

eddythompson80 1y ago
Cute story, but do you think a massive company that specializes in loans and credit would move to the largest credit market in the world with a 100 years of very detailed financial data and models about loans, delinquencies, defaults, bankruptcies, etc but “it never occurred to them” to check that?
- kevinsync 1y ago
  I mean, that was the literal whole point of the article, that they were culturally caught off guard. It happens! I'm going to try to find it again and edit this with a link.
  - jjj123 1y ago
    How does that account for the disgusting klarna ads I see in NYC that glorify buying things you cannot afford? Either they got over their shock fast and learned how to take advantage of us, or it was the plan all along.
  - eddythompson80 1y ago
    I’m not doubting the existence of such article. I’m asking you to engage some critical thinking and not accept whatever cute, PR or otherwise “fun” narrative you read anywhere. It’s “fun” to think that Starbucks struggles in Italy is because they are dumb and didn’t realize that Italians have a long cultural tradition with coffee that’s very different than Americans. “Oh dumb Americans and dumb Starbucks. How stupid are they to try to sell espresso in the land of espresso lol”. You need to engage just a little bit of critical thinking and realize that Starbucks knew that well in advance and thought the would give it a shot anyway. Maybe they could occupy a different cultural niche just like they did in dozens of other countries with similarly rich cultural traditions around coffeeshops and coffee or tea like the Middle East and Asia.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ipsum2 1y ago

That was a fun read, but the author never actually buys a taco with Klarna from what I can tell.

catlover76 1y ago
[dead]
naniwaduni 1y ago
The fact that the author has never actually bought a taco with Klarna pretty clearly detracts from the article, even, in that they really don't seem to have any idea how the other half interacts with financial services.
theahura 1y ago
I really should have bought a taco with klarna, mea culpa. It definitely would have made the article better

Terr_ 1y ago

> convince everyone that this is beeblebrox and therefore the previous rules don’t apply. This reminds me of how services like Realpage have been described as "algorithmic price-fixing." There's something traditionally illegal (but profitable), and people try to get away with it by slapping on "but with a computer" as some kind of twist that's supposed to make it OK. Sometimes there's a POSIWID [0] aspect to it, where the excuse is "no human explicitly designed the system to do X from the ground up"... which is a distraction from "we kept shopping around and tweaking until it started to do X and then we decided to make that a core part of our business." That might be a defense against mens rea, but once someone points out that you created a crime-machine by accident, you still gotta fix it or turn it off. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

dangus 1y ago

The article doesn’t mention it directly but as they alluded to, all these buy now pay later companies are bleeding money, which is kind of impressive in itself. Delinquency rates are very high, and there isn’t much recourse for them when someone decides not to pay.