13 ms·

Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa

108 points by footpath 12y ago

Morcane 12y ago
It's pretty clear most of the commenters here have never been poor, but instead look at everything from their startup bubbles. And no, I'm not talking about the self-induced poverty where you put money in your own company, and you eat noodles every day for 2 years. I've been poor, and yea, I'd totally see people going that way to get a sofa, just to feel like a bloody normal family. One less thing to think about. Sounds whack, but that's how it is.
MadManE 12y ago
TL;DR Luxuries cost much more for those who might not pay for them.
- paulornothing 12y ago
  It should actually be TL;DR It's very profitable to exploit the poor.
  - cheald 12y ago
    %s/the poor/people with poor impulse control/
  - MadManE 12y ago
    Nothing about this is exploitative. Poor people have a very high chance of not paying these debts, so they are charged a much higher fee over time instead of being able to pay a lump sum. These are not necessities for living. iPads, couches, and lamps are luxuries in varying degrees. These people can always make the choice to simply not buy them.
    - notahacker 12y ago
      The cost of collecting from delinquent debtors does have to be taken into account. Here's the profit margins of the rent-to-own industry leaders in context (from their lobby group) http://www.rtohq.org/legislative-resources/rto-vs-retail-a-profit-comparison/ http://www.rtohq.org/legislative-resources/rto-vs-retail-a-p... Massively overcharging poor people for products they probably shouldn't buy is a profitable endeavour, but only in line with the margins made by budget retailers usually regarded as offering good value-for-money
      - MadManE 12y ago
        This is a good point that I forget about. People seem to assume that just because the prices being charged are insane (and they are), then the business must be lighting cigars with $100 bills. There is a reason that the prices are so high. It's not just the "evil capitalists".
  - zo1 12y ago
    I'm curious what your definition of "exploitation" is.
cheald 12y ago
> Perhaps she could have saved up the money on her own, but whenever she has tried to do so, her stash has been wiped out to handle daily needs. I...what makes you think you can handle payments on a lease if you can't save what you'd be paying on those payments otherwise? People are really bad at managing money. The proliferation of credit has done immense damage to peoples' abilities to conceptualize what they can afford.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Because you don't need to save up as much to make payments on a lease. Those are, let's say $50 a month. As soon as you get your paycheck, you send that $50 to the rent-to-own agency, and that money is gone - they're "saving" it for you. Whereas if you keep putting that $25-per-paycheck into a savings account (or a shoebox, or a hollowed-out book or whatever), there will probably come a time when being able to fix your car's transmission, or buying food to make sure your kids aren't starving, or having just one dinner at a place with cloth napkins, is going to seem more important than whatever you're saving for.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Which is really a sign that y'know, you can't afford what you were saving up for since you don't have enough saved for anything going wrong...
  - cheald 12y ago
    But that just means that you couldn't afford the lease to begin with. All you're doing is spending your transmission-fixing money and ending up with no asset to show for it. You can't sell that couch to pay for your transmission - it's money down a hole. Yes, you can afford a payment today, but you can't afford the couch, if you can't otherwise save to buy it outright.
  - kstenerud 12y ago
    Yes, exactly right. All the more reason not to hobble yourself with crippling financial obligations just to get a new sofa. They're essentially locking themselves into a financial decision that cannot be undone, and therefore when, later on down the road, more important financial decision points present themselves, they're unable to cope. But this ties into the poverty trap where you simply stop thinking about the future because you're out of hope.
monksy 12y ago
Part of me is disgusted that this business is allowed to operate in this manner. However, the sensible side is frustrated that these people aren't doing basic math. These people are choosing to buy something that they can't afford. Do they need these items? Does anyone need a couch? Does anyone NEED a TV/wedding ring? No. You can live without it. End the end: All I got from this article was: "Look at these people who don't realize where they stand financially and refuse to accept that it's not where they'd like to be."
- nkozyra 12y ago
  > Part of me is disgusted that this business is allowed to operate in this manner. I understand this sentiment, but it's risk mitigation. As the article points out, there are no options for these people outside of this. It's serving a market and it's doing so in a way that reduces the risk - in some ways for both parties. Is it a smart move on the part of customers? I think it's hard to argue that it is, but I don't know that it's necessarily the fault of these businesses. If anything, it's a better move than going to an Amscot or getting a subprime credit card, because you're not wrecked financially nor is your credit ruined necessarily.
  - bluedino 12y ago
    >> As the article points out, there are no options for these people outside of this. Going without a 60" TV or iPad isn't an option?
    - plorg 12y ago
      The TV, no, but it is entirely possible that the iPad is being used for internet access. At this point in time a person without internet access is at a serious disadvantage to the larger population.
      - S4M 12y ago
        How about buying second hand computers or laptops?
bluedino 12y ago
Immediate gratification. It's easy to walk into Rent-a-center and come out with a TV, couch, iPad, laptop, etc without realizing that for those weekly payments, you could buy one of those items each month. In a few months you own them all outright. This isn't just for low-income people. Plenty of people making a decent salary will go out and overextend themselves when they get their first apartment as well. Rent-a-center comes to take stuff back from people that make $60k/year just as often as they do from people who make $30k/year. I'm also not sure I'd classify people as 'poor' who have $300/month they can spend on renting these items which are mostly luxury items. You can argue that you 'need' a TV or laptop to live, but you can get a $200 laptop or $200 TV, instead of $1,000 models.
mikeash 12y ago
I'm annoyed at how this story portrays these rental ripoff places as being the only choice. Sure, if you must buy a new $1,500 couch, then it's their only choice. But what about not buying expensive new furniture when you're poor? I don't mean to blame the victim, here. But it really rubs me the wrong way that the article doesn't even mention the possibility that a person could not buy stuff they don't need. We could do with a lot better financial education. Far too many people think of large purchases in terms of a monthly cost. We could also do with usury laws that enforced better and harder to dodge. But we could also do with a discussion of these things that doesn't paint buying a $1,500 sofa as the "only option".
- ownagefool 12y ago
  It's worse than that, they just have no sense of delayed gratification.
- andrewstuart2 12y ago
  I think in general teaching acutal responsibility is the deeper answer. If you keep blaming other people for the problems you get yourself into (a pattern this article perpetuates) you'll continue having those problems because the actual cause (i.e. you) never gets addressed.
- cheald 12y ago
  Or that they could buy it from Goodwill. Or a garage sale. Or through Craigslist. Or at any of the myriad furniture outlet stores that sell flawed and used furniture at pennies on the dollar. There are lots of options, but they usually involve paying cash, which means having the discipline to save cash for what you want and not spend it when you want something else.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Or pick stuff up off the street on garbage day. Been there, done that, still have a garbage-rescue stool sitting around my expensive townhouse.
    - 12y ago
madengr 12y ago
I call BS on not being able to afford Craigslist items. You can find leather furniture (i.e. low likelihood of bed bugs) for cheap.
timedoctor 12y ago
The attitude of renting or getting a loan for any consumer item is financial suicide. Why they don't buy second hand I don't know? You can go to an auction site, get the same $1500 sofa for $500.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > The attitude of renting or getting a loan for any consumer item is financial suicide. When we moved into our house, we bought all our furniture on a zero-interest, four year loan. It made a lot of financial sense to pay a fairly low monthly payment and have the large amount of money available for investments.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Similarly, I nearly got a zero-interest loan on the car I bought last year, but we changed our minds at the last minute when it turned out there was a nice hidden discount for paying up-front. I think better phrasing would be that needing to rent or get a loan for any consumer item is a bad idea. It's fine to take out a loan if you have the cash anyway but find it advantageous to hold onto it, but if you're relying on future income to buy the stuff now, it's a sign of trouble.
IanDrake 12y ago
>Abbott and Donald smoked a cigarette in the bathroom and sorted through the grim math So they can afford cigarettes? I have a hard time feeling bad for people with low income and expensive vices.
- osi 12y ago
  .. but if the vices are expensive primarily due to taxes...
  - ctdonath 12y ago
    Much of such taxes make vices expensive precisely to discourage indulgence in those vices.
- llamataboot 12y ago
  Smoking is an addiction, and it is highly correlated with poverty for a variety of reasons, some of which I'm sure you can find if you step off the personal responsibility high-horse for a moment.
  - MrZongle2 12y ago
    So at what point are the individuals themselves responsible for their actions? Or is it addictions, poverty, and other external and unavoidable tragedies all the way down?
    - mikeash 12y ago
      The point is when you're talking about large populations as a whole. It's like the saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem. Here, if one person is stuck in poverty because of poor life choices, they have a problem. If ten million people are stuck in poverty because of poor life choices, we all have a problem. Rather than point fingers and talk about "responsibility" and all the rest, it would be much more useful to simply talk about why this happens (both internal and external reasons), what can be done to help, and whether those actions are worthwhile.
aeturnum 12y ago
I find it saddening and ironic that commenters here are having trouble seeing the problem. The math is right there! The buyers should just stay within their means! However, if we talk about a topic closer to the experience of the HN crowd (say, Facebook's privacy policies), the tune quickly changes. People get up in arms about the privacy policy, or the ad model, or anything else that might affect their own lives. Have a little empathy. These people sign contracts without understanding what they are agreeing to, and instead of their vacation photos, they're out thousands of dollars - substantial sections of their entire net worth. On the other hand, if that sounds good, there are all sorts of payday loan companies that would love investors for new branches I'm sure. Edit: I don't mean the buyers don't grasp the full cost, but that they have difficulty projecting their lives 6, 12, 18 months in the future. I'm not under the impression the people in the story are dumb or ignorant.
- arenaninja 12y ago
  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
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    I think it comes from all the Political Correctness that many of us in the Western World have to adjust to or face employment termination, scrutiny, social insulation. 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.
    - _broody 12y ago
      The matter is not just about one couple engaging in 'stupid' economically self-destructive behavior. 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?
untom 12y ago
This pisses me off so hard. This isn't some poor person needing a couch, this is downright irresponsible on the buyer's part, and then they complain about the pricing. I can hit craigslist and get free couches that are perfectly usable all day long. My house is almost entirely filled with craigslist and garage sale furniture. I have a beautiful solid wood armoir for my 26" flatscreen tv. It and everything inside it cost less than 60 bucks. I don't go out buying 1000 dollar 60" tvs for 5000 dollars. That's rediculous, nobody needs to, it's just consumerism at it's worst.
- noahl 12y ago
  You're certainly right that buying an expensive item without having the money to do it is a bad idea, but think about the infrastructure and amount of time you needed to find those cheap items. You had a working computer or phone, an Internet connection, and enough knowledge to know to look at Craigslist. When you found your item, you probably had to arrange shipment, but it was no problem for you because you either had a car that could carry it, had a friend with one, or in the worst case, were able to rent one. Finally, you had several blocks of time that weren't already filled with things you had to do to handle searching Craigslist, maybe searching again, and finally going to pick up and take home your new piece of furniture. I don't know your specific circumstances, and I apologize if the points above don't all apply to you. But it's important to realize that there are a lot of non-obvious resources that people from wealthy backgrounds have that they don't even think about which allow them to save money.
  - MrZongle2 12y ago
    ...but think about the infrastructure and amount of time you needed to find those cheap items. One can purchase a local paper for $1.00 or less. Yard sales and Goodwill stores are free and easy to peruse on a weekend morning. Let's not pretend that finding a couch is a herculean task, or saving up the cash for a couple of months is nigh impossible.
    - bitJericho 12y ago
      You could buy a minivan to haul it (and finance it at a reasonable rate), and buy a craigslist couch for the amount she spent on her couch.
jack-r-abbit 12y ago
> "Perhaps she could have saved up the money on her own, but whenever she has tried to do so, her stash has been wiped out to handle daily needs." If you can't keep up with payments to yourself, you have no business entering into a contract to make payments to someone else.
MarkLowenstein 12y ago
Alternate title: Why people who pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa are poor
- ctdonath 12y ago
  This. Some feel entitled to have something ("I want it, I deserve it, I'm getting it, I don't care about consequences" - yes, I often hear that one). Some think they can afford it but can't ("oh, it's just $30/mo, and I've got $100/mo to spare" - and they do this 6 times). Some fall for fast-talk marketing ("look at this great-looking new $5000 sofa! for just $50/mo you can have it right now!" - no timeframe specified, same thing is $1500 down the street). Some just don't understand finances ("I can't be broke, my credit card still works"). Some are proving something ("I bought it just to convince myself I'm rich enough to" - yup, hear that one too). Some just trust it will work out ("I spend $150/day, my spouse takes care of it" - while he gets second & third job, leveraging finances to the breaking point, as she ignores his pleas to stop). All of it adds up to: you're poor because you're spending $4150 for a $1500 sofa you could have gotten off Craigslist for $100 and which you didn't need anyway. Ignorant, willful or malicious, outgo > income => poverty. I keep thinking back to a moment of comprehension: I was repairing a poor family's sofa (gratis, because I care even though I'd only met them that day), wondering why it was damaged the way it was, when the tweenagers asked me for a sheet of plastic to cover the window they had just torn the screen out of (and presumably had prior broken the glass) - hit me that they were in the state they were in because they had as a way of life wantonly destroyed what they had. Yes, some are poor because life dealt them a bad hand; don't conflate them with those who CHOOSE to be poor. And to the currently lead comment: I am empathetic, and continue to assist the poor - but empathy wears thin when people make stupid choices on a regular basis and blame those who merely fulfill their demands & desires.
comrade1 12y ago
What's probably just as infuriating to some is that I notice as my wife and I get older and get higher and higher incomes and assets it becomes increasingly easy to spend less money. As an example, we just bought the company car my wife gets that we'd been driving for free for the last couple of years. We bought it at about 50% of the new value, an significantly discounted from the used price. There's also things like deferred compensation, pension payments, etc that make it easier and easier for people with money to spend less and save more. And related to the story, we never buy anything on credit. Not even the car we just bought. It's cash or bank transfer, or if we do pay by credit card for something it's paid each month. We keep our credit card limits quite low though.
- ominous_prime 12y ago
  Yes. It's amazingly expensive to be poor. I have the luxury of using credit cards solely for net30 financing. Car loan -- maybe if I'm fairly certain my investment account will return more than the loan APR. Without that cushion of liquidity, it's all too easy to slip into a cycle of needing credit to stay afloat. Saving small amounts doesn't feel useful, so you don't do it; and small charges don't feel like they will hurt you, so you rack them up. It's a societal problem as much as a educational one. I have no idea where we go from here, but I wonder if social systems like basic income would help alleviate the problem.
  - ryan-c 12y ago
    There's also the fact that, at least in the US, you can get credit cards that will pay you to use them if you have good credit.
byEngineer 12y ago
I invite all the downvotes, but my satisfaction comes from the realization that on the bottom of your heart you know this is true: Why stupid pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa? Because when I was poor I collected one from the street for free. It hasn't even crossed my mind to go to a store when broken.
- arenaninja 12y ago
  Did you have kids at the time? I don't think you would've been as comfortable picking up a sofa potentially infested with who-knows-what and your kids sleeping on it. I've been poor too, but I had the distinct advantage of an education, which made it clear that certain choices were better than others. Let's not forget that not everyone enjoys that advantage (whether it's available or not)
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    craigslist, you can pick one up for a few hundred, I'm sure. With kids, that's what I would do.
    - arenaninja 12y ago
      How would you arrange for transportation? When do you have time to look at craigslist if you're working 7 days a week, getting up at 5:30AM to take the bus to your job 1.5 hours away at a factory, and cleaning houses on weekends? What I'm trying to get at is that being poor is not enough to produce what's seen in this article. You need a combination of poverty, broken family unit, lack of education (just because the school is down the street doesn't mean your parents are going to let you attend!), even craigslist is something that you might never have heard of!
      - byEngineer 12y ago
        ok, then pick up one from the street for free, but talk to the folks at which house you are picking it up from. Tell them you are going to have for your kid, etc. Then, if you are working 7 days a week, getting up at 5:30am, and all that stuff - why the heck you need a sofa for $1,500? Safe and invest this $1,500 in your child's education for Goodness sake! This is what poor Jews have been doing in the US since before-ww2 and look how well it worked for them! And blunt jokes aside -- I would fill much more fulfilled putting this 1500 to my kids college fund/whatever then buying something I don't really need. Why are you poor? Because you are stupid. Why are you stupid? Because you are poor. No one will break the vicious circle for them. They have to do it.
colinbartlett 12y ago
This is exactly how the major wireless carriers work. Consumers pay 2x for a phone because they can't afford to pay upfront for their phone. Or because they don't do the math to realize how how much more they're paying by financing their phone rather than saving up for it.
dutchbrit 12y ago
What about second hand couches? I'm not sure how it all goes in the US, but here in Holland, we can get tons of free couches that look fine, do people sell everything they want to get rid of over there? - http://www.marktplaats.nl/z/huis-en-inrichting/banken-bankstellen/bank.html?query=bank&categoryId=505&sortBy=price&sortOrder=increasing http://www.marktplaats.nl/z/huis-en-inrichting/banken-bankst... Stuff like this disgusts me. How is it even legal to charge so much interest?!
- s1300045 12y ago
  To provide some background, one needs to understand the United States is vast geographically. Driving for 2 hours over 100 miles (160 kms) is considered normal to a lot of people. That creates a huge gap among the poor and the middle class in terms of resources. I live in Chicago, and it is very, very easy to get a user couch in great condition for under $100 because the supply is plenty. People here can afford to get rid of their barely used furniture for whatever reason they like. On the other hand, people living in the poor, rural areas have no access to this supply of cheap quality used goods. And they don't have the means to leave. I would suppose opening up a business that transfer used goods from the rich area to poor area and capitalize on the margin would be a great idea in a lot of ways.
  - bluedino 12y ago
    If you can drive over to Aaron's to get a couch, you can drive to someone's on craigslist to buy one (or have them bring it to you for an extra $20)
  - monksy 12y ago
    > live in Chicago I imagine if you were patient enough you'd find a really good couch on Craigslist free section.
- ryan-c 12y ago
  I paid $100 for my current couch second hand five years ago. Usable free couches in cities tend to be picked up by people who then sell them on craigslist. When I was in my early 20s, I lived in a town that was maybe 30% college students. Apartment complexes would bring out huge dumpsters for "moving day". Much of the stuff that was thrown away was fine, just too much hassle to move. My friends and I would go around in a truck and dumpster dive. We got furniture this way, as well as a TV and a blender that I still have (after through cleaning) many years later. There was a lot of nice stuff that we didn't take we saw over the years - a fossball table and an electric organ stick out in my memory.
tsomctl 12y ago
Other commenters are saying that people shouldn't buy it, a couch isn't necessary. I disagree. I've worked at 10 hour a day jobs of physical labor, where I come home too tired to do anything. Having a comfortable place to sit to recover is essential. Leaning against a wall is awkward. However, the chair I had was a 20 year old office chair falling apart. Super comfortable, even if I had to tighten the screws several times a year.
Morcane 12y ago
It's pretty clear most of the commenters here have never been poor, but instead look at everything from their startup bubbles. I've been poor, and yea, I'd totally see people going that way to get a sofa, just to feel like a bloody normal family.
orbifold 12y ago
Interestingly the US and Great Britain complain that some other European countries do not stimulate their economy by encouraging debt financed consummation and therefore have export heavy economies (e.g. Germany). I guess this is the flip-side, poor people buying stuff they don't really need, without actually being able to afford them, because they have been conditioned to do so. It's not like you couldn't get a perfectly acceptable couch for a few hundred Euros or even for free. Of course in the current economic climate anyone not investing properly and just saving money is losing roughly 2% to inflation and probably even more because the stock market has risen by much more. So countries where people have traditionally left lots of money in saving accounts get screwed over and those that are in debt are rewarded (the majority in the US and GB).
MrZongle2 12y ago
Proper title should be "Rental America: Why the stupid pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa". Let's stop sugar-coating this kind of nonsense and shifting the blame to predatory companies. Nobody made these people spend their money on non-essential furniture and electronics. If we were talking about food, utilities, healthcare or shelter, it would be another thing entirely. But these folks have set aside delayed gratification and voluntarily purchased luxury items at a mark-up that would make a theater concession stand manager blush.
- pluma 12y ago
  That's only partially true. Yes, nobody's pointing a gun at their head and forcing them to buy expensive crap. But there's advertising everywhere. Advertising is there to get people to buy things they might otherwise not buy. I'm not against consumerism, but it's absurd to have companies spend billions on getting people to buy their stuff and then blaming the same people for their purchasing habits. Humans are not rational machines. We're social animals. We do a lot of stupid things. But we're not any more stupid for not being able to grow beyond that.
  - MrZongle2 12y ago
    But there's advertising everywhere. Advertising is there to get people to buy things they might otherwise not buy. But if advertising is such an irresistible siren song, how come you and I -- and everybody else on HN -- are not up to our necks in debt to rent-to-own stores? I don't think its because we're special. I think it's because most of us engage in some kind of critical thinking, self control, and can do basic math. It is the responsibility of the individuals themselves.
    - pluma 12y ago
      If advertising wouldn't work, there wouldn't be so much of it. Look at yourself critically. How many of your last year's purchasing decisions were based on actual need? And of those, how many times could you have bought something cheaper instead? And no rationalisations about cost and quality and long-term amortisations and whatnot, please. Yes, poor people suck at managing their money. But at the same time the advertising industry focusses on them. A lot of price-based advertising relies on people not looking at it closely enough. Yay, free phones with mobile contracts. I can buy a new sofa for only $50/month (over the next ten years). This ringtone costs only 99 cents (if you subscribe for 3 ringtones per week at a cost of $2.97/week and all the ones you want are in different subscriptions and don't forget the offer code you originally subscribed with or you'll have a hard time cancelling the subscription when you notice it a month from now). Our culture places a lot of emphasis on status symbols and wealth. If you're not wealthy, that's because you're lazy. If you can't afford status symbols to prove your wealth it's because you're a failure as a human being. This is an exaggeration, but it's what the mainstream media tells you and what the billboards shout at you. I'm not saying it's impossible to manage your funds well if you barely have any. I've seen plenty of old widows in Germany be able to make do with welfare because they were used to not being able to afford anything (or even theoretically be able to buy anything if they had the money) throughout the post-war period, but we're talking about people who've learned to cope in a situation where it was entirely possible to freeze or starve to death even if you did everything right. Luxury meant having a variety of food on the table (or having spare tobacco for your own use, rather than for trading), not being able to afford the latest iPhone. I would also argue that HN necessarily isn't representative of "average folks". The average HN user is special. Not better, but different. There's a disproportionate amount of entrepreneurs (yes, they are the exception) for example. Plus, there's the survivor bias: if you're here, you probably haven't found it an impossible task to keep out of poverty (even if you ever were close to it). If you had, you wouldn't be here in the first place. But the entire point is moot anyway. If everyone is able to engage in some kind of critical thinking, self control and doing basic math, and still there are a lot of people trapped in these cut-throat contracts, the average person is evidently not sufficiently able to avoid them (and if those things are all it takes to do so, they are evidently not as good at them). But I think this isn't a question of facts, it's a question of ideology: I think it's our responsibility as a society to keep people out of situations where they become practically unable to act freely (even if they only have themselves to blame). You seem to hold the opinion that if they screw up their own lives, we have no obligation to help them and they only owe it to themselves.
drcube 12y ago
Except for mattresses, there is simply no reason to buy new furniture. I'm an engineer, I had a house fire recently and will easily have the budget to buy new furniture for my house after it is repaired. But I plan on shopping at Goodwill, Savers and Craigslist. Because new furniture is not necessary. Why would someone who is much poorer than me think otherwise?
- kwhitefoot 12y ago
  I upvoted you but not because I agree with what seems to be the implication, rather because I think it is an important question that gets to the core of the problem. >Why would someone who is much poorer than me think otherwise? It's, partly, because they are poorer than you that they think otherwise. The mere fact that it is new is part of what makes it attractive and because poor people often do not actually know how those of us who are well off actually live they aspire to what they assume are the trappings of wealth.
duckingtest 12y ago
No "the poor", but "the idiots". The family described isn't even poor, but they waste so much money trying to live a middle class lifestyle they live seriously below their means. You're poor if you have serious problems having food and a basic place to live in at the same time, without spending anything on bullshit. If your problem is 'I can't afford this sofa', or a new ipad, you aren't poor, you just aren't wealthy.
buyx 12y ago
In South Africa, most consumers are poorly educated, and ignorant, and furniture retailers have been milking them in a similar way for decades. The National Credit Act, introduced in 2007, was supposed to tighten up on reckless and exploitative lending, but they figured out all the loopholes. The Marikana massacre in 2012, which was the worst example of post-apartheid unrest can be traced to ignorant mineworkers having their wages garnished by creditors. In the last few months, African Bank, which owned a furniture company, imploded. JD Group, the dominant furniture retailer, that was built on exploitative credit, is spinning off its financial assets. Still, there is more pain ahead. How ironic that the U.S. is allowing its poor to be exploited the same way.
gyardley 12y ago
The American educational system needs to do a better job teaching financial literacy, it seems - and they need to start that education early, before irresponsible people like this one drop out of school in ninth grade.
incision 12y ago
Funny thing about being broke, it seems to come with an intense even overwhelming desire to feel/signal otherwise in what are usually counterproductive ways. Where I grew up, everybody was pretty damn poor. Still, probably half my neighborhood or more was beholden to Rent-A-Center for a dining room set or couch. Most were ashamed to shop at K-Mart or even buy generic cereal. That said, I think IKEA could do tidy business by targeting a slimmed down catalog to the areas where rent to own thrives.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  Basically, low status leads to a lot of stress.So unless the community as a whole is educated towards non-consumer ways , everybody is in a trap.
post_break 12y ago
Look at this on a micro scale. Cell phones. Tons of people have iPhones. You can watch it happen in real time inside any T-Mobile store. Every time I go someone stomps out without an iPhone, you know why? They abolished contracts. Tell someone they have to spend $650 on an iPhone today. They will balk. Tell someone they can spend $200 on an iPhone. They will sign their life away. And that $200 iPhone quickly becomes a much more expensive iPhone.
JoelSutherland 12y ago
The same thing that happened to the family in the article is happening to the commenters in this thread -- but in reverse! Just as the furniture rental place likely never told the family that the weekly-payment total would be $4,150, the article doesn't clearly show the price the family was looking at: $57.64/week. I'm much more sympathetic to their decision when looking at the two numbers they were faced with: $58 vs $1500. A bad sofa on Craigslist is $200. It seems like a good solution to the problem would be to require the $4150 total to be made explicit on a standardized disclosure form, not unlike what you see on a home mortgage.
lostcolony 12y ago
Rather than berating people for not considering the cost, put it into a perspective you can see. Sure, eating 10,000 calories in one meal is not something your waistline can afford, and you recognize that, but that's about what that one donut a week is equivalent to over the year. It's really easy to say "Okay" to something you really really want when it's a small periodic cost, and even if at some level you know it adds up, you still can make that mistake really easily, and get irritated at the person who keeps bringing them to the Friday meeting (or whatever). So some irritation at the system allowing this behavior might be reasonable.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Absolutely. And when an article talks about how eating one donut a week is the "only option" for many people to reach 10,000 excess calories per year, and never even mentions the possibility of not eating 10,000 excess calories per year, there's something seriously wrong with the writing.
ja27 12y ago
I used to volunteer with the American Red Cross, mostly going out to help people that were displaced by fires in their home. It was an amazing contrast to see. Almost every time we had a fire in subsidised housing units, they would be decked out like a Buddy's showroom, often complete with a bigger TV than I had. But if you went to cheap unsubsidized apartments or trailers, you'd see a lot more "found it at the curb" couches and milkcrates-as-shelves. Part of that is transportation and availability. A guy living in a lower middle class or so neighborhood that drives a pickup is a lot more likely to find and grab a free / cheap couch than a single mom taking the bus to work.
deleted 12y ago
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chavesn 12y ago
> So Abbott and her husband walked into Buddy’s this past winter, hoping to replace the old sofa in their trailer, six years old, its wiring poking through the bottom, cutting gashes into the living room floor. I once bought a couch set for about the same price, but yet, thankfully, I could afford to pay for it up front. I got two loveseats and a couch for about $1600. Funny story -- 6 years later, all were in perfectly fine condition -- the springs were NOT poking out the bottom, not cutting "gashes" in my floor. I split up the set and sold them through Craigslist for about $950 total. My total 6-year cost? $650, or $2/week for the whole set. I'm not going to draw any broad conclusions on the wealth/capital/income gap or privilege, or anything like that -- but the author does readers a disservice to gloss over the poor assumptions that lead to many believing they are "forced" to make these kinds of purchases.
buyx 12y ago
People are ignoring the elephant in the room: a lack of intelligence on the part of these people. It's one thing to have a CS degree and figure out the maths of owning vs renting, but quite another to expect a ninth grade dropout to do the same. The idea that all people are capable of making rational choices is a myth. And yes, stupid people tend to be poor, and poor people tend to be stupid. I live in a country where the vast majority of people were kept uneducated (and I profit handsomely from the educational/intelligence differential between me and them). They would be eaten alive by big business if the government didn't make an effort to protect them-and the givernment knows it is into own interest to protect the poor in the interests of social stability, since there are so many of them. The way I see it, is that governments in the US have no need to protect the poor from the consequences of their own stupid choices, even if it is ethically the right thing to do.
- johnnymonster 12y ago
  We live in a legal society that allows anyone to chop off their own hand. I see it as both good and bad in a lot of ways.
- Meekro 12y ago
  When the government deliberately keeps people uneducated, then I agree with you -- it's unethical to force people into that rut and then take advantage of them for being there. But the government in the US is trying to get everyone educated -- not always effectively, though. I know some schools suck, I went to a public school in the middle of a ghetto. Many of the students came from impoverished families, and would routinely bite the hand that feeds them when it came to education -- by disrupting class, (very proudly) not doing their homework, and whatnot. Watching that kind of behavior day-after-day took away any sympathy I might have for the consequences of their actions.
johnnymonster 12y ago
I would be nice to see businesses focus on trying to help people to a solution rather than feeding their addiction. This business helping them buy material things is just as bad as the corner street drug dealer. They are just dealing legal items instead of illegal ones. If a business model were to come along that would help teach them how to attain what they want through financially responsible means instead of loan sharking, I believe it would be incredible for the impoverished society. I have been in this sort of situation and I know the mindset. You can not even understand how to set goals, to figure out how to better your future! You have no idea what to do, and these business prey on that mindset. However, if you had a business that taught how to save for items you need and want, how to set goals and put away money, it would greatly change these peoples lives!
gexla 12y ago
> Normal families have sofas, she says, and you’ll do what it takes to feel normal. This is the problem. They have certain expectations set as to what a "normal" life is. A big, fluffy, crap sofa. Park the thing in front of the T.V. and waste your time. Come to the Philippines, it's a great place to reset expectations. Personally, I would rather setup the "living room" in nomadic style. Throw a rug and some cushions on the floor. Maybe arrange them around a circular bamboo table on which you can set food on. Sit around that table and talk to your family and friends. > Some weeks, they couldn’t pay their cellphone bills. In the Philippines, people don't have cellphone bills. Nearly everyone goes prepaid.
SheepSlapper 12y ago
Reminds me a lot of the Sam Vimes Boots Theory: "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness." I know people that rent to own, and while part of me is screaming "WTF, save up for a couple of months" inside, another part understands the thought process that gets you things like couches NOW but at 4x the cost.
- AtmaScout 12y ago
  It seems like I've read something similar in a biography about Rockefeller. Thanks for sharing.
- kwhitefoot 12y ago
  Snap! Made the same comment just now. I often wonder how popular Pratchett's books are in the US and whether people see the parallels.
pseudometa 12y ago
This reminded me of how much more people pay for houses on loan vs with cash. If you pay using a loan, you may pay double the cost by the time it is paid off. The only plus side with a house is the possibility that the value will increase and offset the difference some. No matter how you look at it, that furniture will never increase in value.
rbcgerard 12y ago
Its interesting because: 1. there is a logical reason the stores charge what they do("some 75 percent of items are returned or repossessed within weeks of the transaction" Anyone care to calculate what the interest rate should be on a loan with a ~75% chance of default?) 2. The prices that stores charge are not a "good deal" and therefore increasing sales "hurts people" 3. Shouldn't people be allowed to make decisions that may be against their best interest - at least in the U.S. there is/was a national sense of personal freedom and self determination
agentultra 12y ago
I find it saddening that the commenters here are having trouble with being empathetic. People who are exploited don't need your advice. We all know that we can live in a lean-to made of spruce branches and dry pine needles if we had to. That's not the problem these people have. Maybe the commenters here offering their well-intentioned advice are unaware of the shame and guilt that goes with being poor. It is widely believed in popular culture that your financial situation and future are within your hands and beyond reasonable misfortunes, if you end up poor, it's self-inflicted: you mismanaged your money, you decided to have an alcohol addiction, you don't know how to follow safety procedures and lost your leg, you didn't study hard in school and save money to go to college. You didn't work hard enough. You're lazy. You're stupid. You smell. You could dress better. Blah blah blah. The problem is that these rent-to-own businesses exploit that shame and guilt. They're using some pretty under-handed tactics to convince economically disadvantaged people that they can afford these luxury goods they clearly cannot. They try to sound appealing by offering luxury goods to people who cannot otherwise afford them so that they can stop feeling like they are failures. They obscure the true cost of their payment plans with sticker prices that emphasize the lowest term prices and not the full cost (car advertisers like to show the lease-cost in the commercial but are required in most places I know to disclose the full price of the car in the ad). To say that these people are "stupid" for falling in with these businesses is ignorant of the predatory practices these businesses are using and the complicating factors which result in poverty.
gregatragenet2 12y ago
It is interesting how this thread is split between messages of 'they should make better decisions' and then the reply/response that absolves the decision-maker by stating that it's the fault of the 'stress of poverty', not the fault of the decision-maker. I think the reason more people make these short-sighted bad decisions is exactly because they're being told that being in poverty doesn't have anything to do with the personal decisions you make but your 'circumstance'. If we tell people this, what motivation do they have to make prudent long-term decisions at the expense of short-term gratification? What they decide as an individual doesn't matter, or so their told - and they are told that it's a 'societal' problem, that 'society' needs to address/fix, so again, where's the motivation to make sacrifices at an individual level to increase one's lot in life? Regardless of the reality - of the two statements "it's your decisions that affect your level of poverty" and "it's society's fault you are poor" - one of these statements empowers the individual to make better choices, and the other discourages it. PS: +1 to the folks who said garage sale / thrift store / second-hand couches. It's mind-boggling that anyone struggling w/ money would buy(/rent) new furniture.
kwhitefoot 12y ago
I think the point several people have made about wanting a 'normal' life is important. The relentless advertising of an unachievable life that American, and other countries', media saturates peoples lives with must be a factor. I am reasonably well off and have no money worries, live in a country where differences between rich and poor are small. I could easily afford to buy a USD 1500 sofa, I could even without any impact on my life pay the over USD 4k that the woman in the article will actually pay. But in fact I have never done either, the leather sofa I have cost me the equivalent of USD 100, in fact it cost me another USD 50 to have it delivered. The point is that the sofa does not make me feel that I am poor so I feel pressured to spend more money on it. In addition it's simply expensive to be poor as several people have pointed out, see Vimes Boots on http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Samuel_Vimes http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Samuel_Vimes

108 points by footpath 12y ago

It's pretty clear most of the commenters here have never been poor, but instead look at everything from their startup bubbles. And no, I'm not talking about the self-induced poverty where you put money in your own company, and you eat noodles every day for 2 years. I've been poor, and yea, I'd totally see people going that way to get a sofa, just to feel like a bloody normal family. One less thing to think about. Sounds whack, but that's how it is.

MadManE 12y ago

TL;DR Luxuries cost much more for those who might not pay for them.

paulornothing 12y ago
It should actually be TL;DR It's very profitable to exploit the poor.
- cheald 12y ago
  %s/the poor/people with poor impulse control/
- MadManE 12y ago
  Nothing about this is exploitative. Poor people have a very high chance of not paying these debts, so they are charged a much higher fee over time instead of being able to pay a lump sum. These are not necessities for living. iPads, couches, and lamps are luxuries in varying degrees. These people can always make the choice to simply not buy them.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    The cost of collecting from delinquent debtors does have to be taken into account. Here's the profit margins of the rent-to-own industry leaders in context (from their lobby group) http://www.rtohq.org/legislative-resources/rto-vs-retail-a-profit-comparison/ http://www.rtohq.org/legislative-resources/rto-vs-retail-a-p... Massively overcharging poor people for products they probably shouldn't buy is a profitable endeavour, but only in line with the margins made by budget retailers usually regarded as offering good value-for-money
    - MadManE 12y ago
      This is a good point that I forget about. People seem to assume that just because the prices being charged are insane (and they are), then the business must be lighting cigars with $100 bills. There is a reason that the prices are so high. It's not just the "evil capitalists".
- zo1 12y ago
  I'm curious what your definition of "exploitation" is.

cheald 12y ago

> Perhaps she could have saved up the money on her own, but whenever she has tried to do so, her stash has been wiped out to handle daily needs. I...what makes you think you can handle payments on a lease if you can't save what you'd be paying on those payments otherwise? People are really bad at managing money. The proliferation of credit has done immense damage to peoples' abilities to conceptualize what they can afford.

pavel_lishin 12y ago
Because you don't need to save up as much to make payments on a lease. Those are, let's say $50 a month. As soon as you get your paycheck, you send that $50 to the rent-to-own agency, and that money is gone - they're "saving" it for you. Whereas if you keep putting that $25-per-paycheck into a savings account (or a shoebox, or a hollowed-out book or whatever), there will probably come a time when being able to fix your car's transmission, or buying food to make sure your kids aren't starving, or having just one dinner at a place with cloth napkins, is going to seem more important than whatever you're saving for.
- opendais 12y ago
  Which is really a sign that y'know, you can't afford what you were saving up for since you don't have enough saved for anything going wrong...
- cheald 12y ago
  But that just means that you couldn't afford the lease to begin with. All you're doing is spending your transmission-fixing money and ending up with no asset to show for it. You can't sell that couch to pay for your transmission - it's money down a hole. Yes, you can afford a payment today, but you can't afford the couch, if you can't otherwise save to buy it outright.
- kstenerud 12y ago
  Yes, exactly right. All the more reason not to hobble yourself with crippling financial obligations just to get a new sofa. They're essentially locking themselves into a financial decision that cannot be undone, and therefore when, later on down the road, more important financial decision points present themselves, they're unable to cope. But this ties into the poverty trap where you simply stop thinking about the future because you're out of hope.

monksy 12y ago

Part of me is disgusted that this business is allowed to operate in this manner. However, the sensible side is frustrated that these people aren't doing basic math. These people are choosing to buy something that they can't afford. Do they need these items? Does anyone need a couch? Does anyone NEED a TV/wedding ring? No. You can live without it. End the end: All I got from this article was: "Look at these people who don't realize where they stand financially and refuse to accept that it's not where they'd like to be."

nkozyra 12y ago
> Part of me is disgusted that this business is allowed to operate in this manner. I understand this sentiment, but it's risk mitigation. As the article points out, there are no options for these people outside of this. It's serving a market and it's doing so in a way that reduces the risk - in some ways for both parties. Is it a smart move on the part of customers? I think it's hard to argue that it is, but I don't know that it's necessarily the fault of these businesses. If anything, it's a better move than going to an Amscot or getting a subprime credit card, because you're not wrecked financially nor is your credit ruined necessarily.
- bluedino 12y ago
  >> As the article points out, there are no options for these people outside of this. Going without a 60" TV or iPad isn't an option?
  - plorg 12y ago
    The TV, no, but it is entirely possible that the iPad is being used for internet access. At this point in time a person without internet access is at a serious disadvantage to the larger population.
    - S4M 12y ago
      How about buying second hand computers or laptops?

bluedino 12y ago

Immediate gratification. It's easy to walk into Rent-a-center and come out with a TV, couch, iPad, laptop, etc without realizing that for those weekly payments, you could buy one of those items each month. In a few months you own them all outright. This isn't just for low-income people. Plenty of people making a decent salary will go out and overextend themselves when they get their first apartment as well. Rent-a-center comes to take stuff back from people that make $60k/year just as often as they do from people who make $30k/year. I'm also not sure I'd classify people as 'poor' who have $300/month they can spend on renting these items which are mostly luxury items. You can argue that you 'need' a TV or laptop to live, but you can get a $200 laptop or $200 TV, instead of $1,000 models.

mikeash 12y ago

I'm annoyed at how this story portrays these rental ripoff places as being the only choice. Sure, if you must buy a new $1,500 couch, then it's their only choice. But what about not buying expensive new furniture when you're poor? I don't mean to blame the victim, here. But it really rubs me the wrong way that the article doesn't even mention the possibility that a person could not buy stuff they don't need. We could do with a lot better financial education. Far too many people think of large purchases in terms of a monthly cost. We could also do with usury laws that enforced better and harder to dodge. But we could also do with a discussion of these things that doesn't paint buying a $1,500 sofa as the "only option".

ownagefool 12y ago
It's worse than that, they just have no sense of delayed gratification.
andrewstuart2 12y ago
I think in general teaching acutal responsibility is the deeper answer. If you keep blaming other people for the problems you get yourself into (a pattern this article perpetuates) you'll continue having those problems because the actual cause (i.e. you) never gets addressed.
cheald 12y ago
Or that they could buy it from Goodwill. Or a garage sale. Or through Craigslist. Or at any of the myriad furniture outlet stores that sell flawed and used furniture at pennies on the dollar. There are lots of options, but they usually involve paying cash, which means having the discipline to save cash for what you want and not spend it when you want something else.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Or pick stuff up off the street on garbage day. Been there, done that, still have a garbage-rescue stool sitting around my expensive townhouse.
  - 12y ago

madengr 12y ago

I call BS on not being able to afford Craigslist items. You can find leather furniture (i.e. low likelihood of bed bugs) for cheap.

timedoctor 12y ago

The attitude of renting or getting a loan for any consumer item is financial suicide. Why they don't buy second hand I don't know? You can go to an auction site, get the same $1500 sofa for $500.

ceejayoz 12y ago
> The attitude of renting or getting a loan for any consumer item is financial suicide. When we moved into our house, we bought all our furniture on a zero-interest, four year loan. It made a lot of financial sense to pay a fairly low monthly payment and have the large amount of money available for investments.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Similarly, I nearly got a zero-interest loan on the car I bought last year, but we changed our minds at the last minute when it turned out there was a nice hidden discount for paying up-front. I think better phrasing would be that needing to rent or get a loan for any consumer item is a bad idea. It's fine to take out a loan if you have the cash anyway but find it advantageous to hold onto it, but if you're relying on future income to buy the stuff now, it's a sign of trouble.

IanDrake 12y ago

>Abbott and Donald smoked a cigarette in the bathroom and sorted through the grim math So they can afford cigarettes? I have a hard time feeling bad for people with low income and expensive vices.

osi 12y ago
.. but if the vices are expensive primarily due to taxes...
- ctdonath 12y ago
  Much of such taxes make vices expensive precisely to discourage indulgence in those vices.
llamataboot 12y ago
Smoking is an addiction, and it is highly correlated with poverty for a variety of reasons, some of which I'm sure you can find if you step off the personal responsibility high-horse for a moment.
- MrZongle2 12y ago
  So at what point are the individuals themselves responsible for their actions? Or is it addictions, poverty, and other external and unavoidable tragedies all the way down?
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The point is when you're talking about large populations as a whole. It's like the saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem. Here, if one person is stuck in poverty because of poor life choices, they have a problem. If ten million people are stuck in poverty because of poor life choices, we all have a problem. Rather than point fingers and talk about "responsibility" and all the rest, it would be much more useful to simply talk about why this happens (both internal and external reasons), what can be done to help, and whether those actions are worthwhile.

aeturnum 12y ago

I find it saddening and ironic that commenters here are having trouble seeing the problem. The math is right there! The buyers should just stay within their means! However, if we talk about a topic closer to the experience of the HN crowd (say, Facebook's privacy policies), the tune quickly changes. People get up in arms about the privacy policy, or the ad model, or anything else that might affect their own lives. Have a little empathy. These people sign contracts without understanding what they are agreeing to, and instead of their vacation photos, they're out thousands of dollars - substantial sections of their entire net worth. On the other hand, if that sounds good, there are all sorts of payday loan companies that would love investors for new branches I'm sure. Edit: I don't mean the buyers don't grasp the full cost, but that they have difficulty projecting their lives 6, 12, 18 months in the future. I'm not under the impression the people in the story are dumb or ignorant.

arenaninja 12y ago
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
- byEngineer 12y ago
  I think it comes from all the Political Correctness that many of us in the Western World have to adjust to or face employment termination, scrutiny, social insulation. 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.
  - _broody 12y ago
    The matter is not just about one couple engaging in 'stupid' economically self-destructive behavior. 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?

untom 12y ago

This pisses me off so hard. This isn't some poor person needing a couch, this is downright irresponsible on the buyer's part, and then they complain about the pricing. I can hit craigslist and get free couches that are perfectly usable all day long. My house is almost entirely filled with craigslist and garage sale furniture. I have a beautiful solid wood armoir for my 26" flatscreen tv. It and everything inside it cost less than 60 bucks. I don't go out buying 1000 dollar 60" tvs for 5000 dollars. That's rediculous, nobody needs to, it's just consumerism at it's worst.

noahl 12y ago
You're certainly right that buying an expensive item without having the money to do it is a bad idea, but think about the infrastructure and amount of time you needed to find those cheap items. You had a working computer or phone, an Internet connection, and enough knowledge to know to look at Craigslist. When you found your item, you probably had to arrange shipment, but it was no problem for you because you either had a car that could carry it, had a friend with one, or in the worst case, were able to rent one. Finally, you had several blocks of time that weren't already filled with things you had to do to handle searching Craigslist, maybe searching again, and finally going to pick up and take home your new piece of furniture. I don't know your specific circumstances, and I apologize if the points above don't all apply to you. But it's important to realize that there are a lot of non-obvious resources that people from wealthy backgrounds have that they don't even think about which allow them to save money.
- MrZongle2 12y ago
  ...but think about the infrastructure and amount of time you needed to find those cheap items. One can purchase a local paper for $1.00 or less. Yard sales and Goodwill stores are free and easy to peruse on a weekend morning. Let's not pretend that finding a couch is a herculean task, or saving up the cash for a couple of months is nigh impossible.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    You could buy a minivan to haul it (and finance it at a reasonable rate), and buy a craigslist couch for the amount she spent on her couch.

jack-r-abbit 12y ago

> "Perhaps she could have saved up the money on her own, but whenever she has tried to do so, her stash has been wiped out to handle daily needs." If you can't keep up with payments to yourself, you have no business entering into a contract to make payments to someone else.

MarkLowenstein 12y ago

Alternate title: Why people who pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa are poor

ctdonath 12y ago
This. Some feel entitled to have something ("I want it, I deserve it, I'm getting it, I don't care about consequences" - yes, I often hear that one). Some think they can afford it but can't ("oh, it's just $30/mo, and I've got $100/mo to spare" - and they do this 6 times). Some fall for fast-talk marketing ("look at this great-looking new $5000 sofa! for just $50/mo you can have it right now!" - no timeframe specified, same thing is $1500 down the street). Some just don't understand finances ("I can't be broke, my credit card still works"). Some are proving something ("I bought it just to convince myself I'm rich enough to" - yup, hear that one too). Some just trust it will work out ("I spend $150/day, my spouse takes care of it" - while he gets second & third job, leveraging finances to the breaking point, as she ignores his pleas to stop). All of it adds up to: you're poor because you're spending $4150 for a $1500 sofa you could have gotten off Craigslist for $100 and which you didn't need anyway. Ignorant, willful or malicious, outgo > income => poverty. I keep thinking back to a moment of comprehension: I was repairing a poor family's sofa (gratis, because I care even though I'd only met them that day), wondering why it was damaged the way it was, when the tweenagers asked me for a sheet of plastic to cover the window they had just torn the screen out of (and presumably had prior broken the glass) - hit me that they were in the state they were in because they had as a way of life wantonly destroyed what they had. Yes, some are poor because life dealt them a bad hand; don't conflate them with those who CHOOSE to be poor. And to the currently lead comment: I am empathetic, and continue to assist the poor - but empathy wears thin when people make stupid choices on a regular basis and blame those who merely fulfill their demands & desires.

comrade1 12y ago

What's probably just as infuriating to some is that I notice as my wife and I get older and get higher and higher incomes and assets it becomes increasingly easy to spend less money. As an example, we just bought the company car my wife gets that we'd been driving for free for the last couple of years. We bought it at about 50% of the new value, an significantly discounted from the used price. There's also things like deferred compensation, pension payments, etc that make it easier and easier for people with money to spend less and save more. And related to the story, we never buy anything on credit. Not even the car we just bought. It's cash or bank transfer, or if we do pay by credit card for something it's paid each month. We keep our credit card limits quite low though.

ominous_prime 12y ago
Yes. It's amazingly expensive to be poor. I have the luxury of using credit cards solely for net30 financing. Car loan -- maybe if I'm fairly certain my investment account will return more than the loan APR. Without that cushion of liquidity, it's all too easy to slip into a cycle of needing credit to stay afloat. Saving small amounts doesn't feel useful, so you don't do it; and small charges don't feel like they will hurt you, so you rack them up. It's a societal problem as much as a educational one. I have no idea where we go from here, but I wonder if social systems like basic income would help alleviate the problem.
- ryan-c 12y ago
  There's also the fact that, at least in the US, you can get credit cards that will pay you to use them if you have good credit.

byEngineer 12y ago

I invite all the downvotes, but my satisfaction comes from the realization that on the bottom of your heart you know this is true: Why stupid pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa? Because when I was poor I collected one from the street for free. It hasn't even crossed my mind to go to a store when broken.

arenaninja 12y ago
Did you have kids at the time? I don't think you would've been as comfortable picking up a sofa potentially infested with who-knows-what and your kids sleeping on it. I've been poor too, but I had the distinct advantage of an education, which made it clear that certain choices were better than others. Let's not forget that not everyone enjoys that advantage (whether it's available or not)
- byEngineer 12y ago
  craigslist, you can pick one up for a few hundred, I'm sure. With kids, that's what I would do.
  - arenaninja 12y ago
    How would you arrange for transportation? When do you have time to look at craigslist if you're working 7 days a week, getting up at 5:30AM to take the bus to your job 1.5 hours away at a factory, and cleaning houses on weekends? What I'm trying to get at is that being poor is not enough to produce what's seen in this article. You need a combination of poverty, broken family unit, lack of education (just because the school is down the street doesn't mean your parents are going to let you attend!), even craigslist is something that you might never have heard of!
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      ok, then pick up one from the street for free, but talk to the folks at which house you are picking it up from. Tell them you are going to have for your kid, etc. Then, if you are working 7 days a week, getting up at 5:30am, and all that stuff - why the heck you need a sofa for $1,500? Safe and invest this $1,500 in your child's education for Goodness sake! This is what poor Jews have been doing in the US since before-ww2 and look how well it worked for them! And blunt jokes aside -- I would fill much more fulfilled putting this 1500 to my kids college fund/whatever then buying something I don't really need. Why are you poor? Because you are stupid. Why are you stupid? Because you are poor. No one will break the vicious circle for them. They have to do it.

colinbartlett 12y ago

This is exactly how the major wireless carriers work. Consumers pay 2x for a phone because they can't afford to pay upfront for their phone. Or because they don't do the math to realize how how much more they're paying by financing their phone rather than saving up for it.

dutchbrit 12y ago

What about second hand couches? I'm not sure how it all goes in the US, but here in Holland, we can get tons of free couches that look fine, do people sell everything they want to get rid of over there? - http://www.marktplaats.nl/z/huis-en-inrichting/banken-bankstellen/bank.html?query=bank&categoryId=505&sortBy=price&sortOrder=increasing http://www.marktplaats.nl/z/huis-en-inrichting/banken-bankst... Stuff like this disgusts me. How is it even legal to charge so much interest?!

s1300045 12y ago
To provide some background, one needs to understand the United States is vast geographically. Driving for 2 hours over 100 miles (160 kms) is considered normal to a lot of people. That creates a huge gap among the poor and the middle class in terms of resources. I live in Chicago, and it is very, very easy to get a user couch in great condition for under $100 because the supply is plenty. People here can afford to get rid of their barely used furniture for whatever reason they like. On the other hand, people living in the poor, rural areas have no access to this supply of cheap quality used goods. And they don't have the means to leave. I would suppose opening up a business that transfer used goods from the rich area to poor area and capitalize on the margin would be a great idea in a lot of ways.
- bluedino 12y ago
  If you can drive over to Aaron's to get a couch, you can drive to someone's on craigslist to buy one (or have them bring it to you for an extra $20)
- monksy 12y ago
  > live in Chicago I imagine if you were patient enough you'd find a really good couch on Craigslist free section.
ryan-c 12y ago
I paid $100 for my current couch second hand five years ago. Usable free couches in cities tend to be picked up by people who then sell them on craigslist. When I was in my early 20s, I lived in a town that was maybe 30% college students. Apartment complexes would bring out huge dumpsters for "moving day". Much of the stuff that was thrown away was fine, just too much hassle to move. My friends and I would go around in a truck and dumpster dive. We got furniture this way, as well as a TV and a blender that I still have (after through cleaning) many years later. There was a lot of nice stuff that we didn't take we saw over the years - a fossball table and an electric organ stick out in my memory.

tsomctl 12y ago

Other commenters are saying that people shouldn't buy it, a couch isn't necessary. I disagree. I've worked at 10 hour a day jobs of physical labor, where I come home too tired to do anything. Having a comfortable place to sit to recover is essential. Leaning against a wall is awkward. However, the chair I had was a 20 year old office chair falling apart. Super comfortable, even if I had to tighten the screws several times a year.

Morcane 12y ago

It's pretty clear most of the commenters here have never been poor, but instead look at everything from their startup bubbles. I've been poor, and yea, I'd totally see people going that way to get a sofa, just to feel like a bloody normal family.

orbifold 12y ago

Interestingly the US and Great Britain complain that some other European countries do not stimulate their economy by encouraging debt financed consummation and therefore have export heavy economies (e.g. Germany). I guess this is the flip-side, poor people buying stuff they don't really need, without actually being able to afford them, because they have been conditioned to do so. It's not like you couldn't get a perfectly acceptable couch for a few hundred Euros or even for free. Of course in the current economic climate anyone not investing properly and just saving money is losing roughly 2% to inflation and probably even more because the stock market has risen by much more. So countries where people have traditionally left lots of money in saving accounts get screwed over and those that are in debt are rewarded (the majority in the US and GB).

MrZongle2 12y ago

Proper title should be "Rental America: Why the stupid pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa". Let's stop sugar-coating this kind of nonsense and shifting the blame to predatory companies. Nobody made these people spend their money on non-essential furniture and electronics. If we were talking about food, utilities, healthcare or shelter, it would be another thing entirely. But these folks have set aside delayed gratification and voluntarily purchased luxury items at a mark-up that would make a theater concession stand manager blush.

pluma 12y ago
That's only partially true. Yes, nobody's pointing a gun at their head and forcing them to buy expensive crap. But there's advertising everywhere. Advertising is there to get people to buy things they might otherwise not buy. I'm not against consumerism, but it's absurd to have companies spend billions on getting people to buy their stuff and then blaming the same people for their purchasing habits. Humans are not rational machines. We're social animals. We do a lot of stupid things. But we're not any more stupid for not being able to grow beyond that.
- MrZongle2 12y ago
  But there's advertising everywhere. Advertising is there to get people to buy things they might otherwise not buy. But if advertising is such an irresistible siren song, how come you and I -- and everybody else on HN -- are not up to our necks in debt to rent-to-own stores? I don't think its because we're special. I think it's because most of us engage in some kind of critical thinking, self control, and can do basic math. It is the responsibility of the individuals themselves.
  - pluma 12y ago
    If advertising wouldn't work, there wouldn't be so much of it. Look at yourself critically. How many of your last year's purchasing decisions were based on actual need? And of those, how many times could you have bought something cheaper instead? And no rationalisations about cost and quality and long-term amortisations and whatnot, please. Yes, poor people suck at managing their money. But at the same time the advertising industry focusses on them. A lot of price-based advertising relies on people not looking at it closely enough. Yay, free phones with mobile contracts. I can buy a new sofa for only $50/month (over the next ten years). This ringtone costs only 99 cents (if you subscribe for 3 ringtones per week at a cost of $2.97/week and all the ones you want are in different subscriptions and don't forget the offer code you originally subscribed with or you'll have a hard time cancelling the subscription when you notice it a month from now). Our culture places a lot of emphasis on status symbols and wealth. If you're not wealthy, that's because you're lazy. If you can't afford status symbols to prove your wealth it's because you're a failure as a human being. This is an exaggeration, but it's what the mainstream media tells you and what the billboards shout at you. I'm not saying it's impossible to manage your funds well if you barely have any. I've seen plenty of old widows in Germany be able to make do with welfare because they were used to not being able to afford anything (or even theoretically be able to buy anything if they had the money) throughout the post-war period, but we're talking about people who've learned to cope in a situation where it was entirely possible to freeze or starve to death even if you did everything right. Luxury meant having a variety of food on the table (or having spare tobacco for your own use, rather than for trading), not being able to afford the latest iPhone. I would also argue that HN necessarily isn't representative of "average folks". The average HN user is special. Not better, but different. There's a disproportionate amount of entrepreneurs (yes, they are the exception) for example. Plus, there's the survivor bias: if you're here, you probably haven't found it an impossible task to keep out of poverty (even if you ever were close to it). If you had, you wouldn't be here in the first place. But the entire point is moot anyway. If everyone is able to engage in some kind of critical thinking, self control and doing basic math, and still there are a lot of people trapped in these cut-throat contracts, the average person is evidently not sufficiently able to avoid them (and if those things are all it takes to do so, they are evidently not as good at them). But I think this isn't a question of facts, it's a question of ideology: I think it's our responsibility as a society to keep people out of situations where they become practically unable to act freely (even if they only have themselves to blame). You seem to hold the opinion that if they screw up their own lives, we have no obligation to help them and they only owe it to themselves.

drcube 12y ago

Except for mattresses, there is simply no reason to buy new furniture. I'm an engineer, I had a house fire recently and will easily have the budget to buy new furniture for my house after it is repaired. But I plan on shopping at Goodwill, Savers and Craigslist. Because new furniture is not necessary. Why would someone who is much poorer than me think otherwise?

kwhitefoot 12y ago
I upvoted you but not because I agree with what seems to be the implication, rather because I think it is an important question that gets to the core of the problem. >Why would someone who is much poorer than me think otherwise? It's, partly, because they are poorer than you that they think otherwise. The mere fact that it is new is part of what makes it attractive and because poor people often do not actually know how those of us who are well off actually live they aspire to what they assume are the trappings of wealth.

duckingtest 12y ago

No "the poor", but "the idiots". The family described isn't even poor, but they waste so much money trying to live a middle class lifestyle they live seriously below their means. You're poor if you have serious problems having food and a basic place to live in at the same time, without spending anything on bullshit. If your problem is 'I can't afford this sofa', or a new ipad, you aren't poor, you just aren't wealthy.

buyx 12y ago

In South Africa, most consumers are poorly educated, and ignorant, and furniture retailers have been milking them in a similar way for decades. The National Credit Act, introduced in 2007, was supposed to tighten up on reckless and exploitative lending, but they figured out all the loopholes. The Marikana massacre in 2012, which was the worst example of post-apartheid unrest can be traced to ignorant mineworkers having their wages garnished by creditors. In the last few months, African Bank, which owned a furniture company, imploded. JD Group, the dominant furniture retailer, that was built on exploitative credit, is spinning off its financial assets. Still, there is more pain ahead. How ironic that the U.S. is allowing its poor to be exploited the same way.

gyardley 12y ago

The American educational system needs to do a better job teaching financial literacy, it seems - and they need to start that education early, before irresponsible people like this one drop out of school in ninth grade.

incision 12y ago

Funny thing about being broke, it seems to come with an intense even overwhelming desire to feel/signal otherwise in what are usually counterproductive ways. Where I grew up, everybody was pretty damn poor. Still, probably half my neighborhood or more was beholden to Rent-A-Center for a dining room set or couch. Most were ashamed to shop at K-Mart or even buy generic cereal. That said, I think IKEA could do tidy business by targeting a slimmed down catalog to the areas where rent to own thrives.

pinkyand 12y ago
Basically, low status leads to a lot of stress.So unless the community as a whole is educated towards non-consumer ways , everybody is in a trap.

post_break 12y ago

Look at this on a micro scale. Cell phones. Tons of people have iPhones. You can watch it happen in real time inside any T-Mobile store. Every time I go someone stomps out without an iPhone, you know why? They abolished contracts. Tell someone they have to spend $650 on an iPhone today. They will balk. Tell someone they can spend $200 on an iPhone. They will sign their life away. And that $200 iPhone quickly becomes a much more expensive iPhone.

JoelSutherland 12y ago

The same thing that happened to the family in the article is happening to the commenters in this thread -- but in reverse! Just as the furniture rental place likely never told the family that the weekly-payment total would be $4,150, the article doesn't clearly show the price the family was looking at: $57.64/week. I'm much more sympathetic to their decision when looking at the two numbers they were faced with: $58 vs $1500. A bad sofa on Craigslist is $200. It seems like a good solution to the problem would be to require the $4150 total to be made explicit on a standardized disclosure form, not unlike what you see on a home mortgage.

lostcolony 12y ago

Rather than berating people for not considering the cost, put it into a perspective you can see. Sure, eating 10,000 calories in one meal is not something your waistline can afford, and you recognize that, but that's about what that one donut a week is equivalent to over the year. It's really easy to say "Okay" to something you really really want when it's a small periodic cost, and even if at some level you know it adds up, you still can make that mistake really easily, and get irritated at the person who keeps bringing them to the Friday meeting (or whatever). So some irritation at the system allowing this behavior might be reasonable.

mikeash 12y ago
Absolutely. And when an article talks about how eating one donut a week is the "only option" for many people to reach 10,000 excess calories per year, and never even mentions the possibility of not eating 10,000 excess calories per year, there's something seriously wrong with the writing.

ja27 12y ago

I used to volunteer with the American Red Cross, mostly going out to help people that were displaced by fires in their home. It was an amazing contrast to see. Almost every time we had a fire in subsidised housing units, they would be decked out like a Buddy's showroom, often complete with a bigger TV than I had. But if you went to cheap unsubsidized apartments or trailers, you'd see a lot more "found it at the curb" couches and milkcrates-as-shelves. Part of that is transportation and availability. A guy living in a lower middle class or so neighborhood that drives a pickup is a lot more likely to find and grab a free / cheap couch than a single mom taking the bus to work.

deleted 12y ago

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chavesn 12y ago

> So Abbott and her husband walked into Buddy’s this past winter, hoping to replace the old sofa in their trailer, six years old, its wiring poking through the bottom, cutting gashes into the living room floor. I once bought a couch set for about the same price, but yet, thankfully, I could afford to pay for it up front. I got two loveseats and a couch for about $1600. Funny story -- 6 years later, all were in perfectly fine condition -- the springs were NOT poking out the bottom, not cutting "gashes" in my floor. I split up the set and sold them through Craigslist for about $950 total. My total 6-year cost? $650, or $2/week for the whole set. I'm not going to draw any broad conclusions on the wealth/capital/income gap or privilege, or anything like that -- but the author does readers a disservice to gloss over the poor assumptions that lead to many believing they are "forced" to make these kinds of purchases.

buyx 12y ago

People are ignoring the elephant in the room: a lack of intelligence on the part of these people. It's one thing to have a CS degree and figure out the maths of owning vs renting, but quite another to expect a ninth grade dropout to do the same. The idea that all people are capable of making rational choices is a myth. And yes, stupid people tend to be poor, and poor people tend to be stupid. I live in a country where the vast majority of people were kept uneducated (and I profit handsomely from the educational/intelligence differential between me and them). They would be eaten alive by big business if the government didn't make an effort to protect them-and the givernment knows it is into own interest to protect the poor in the interests of social stability, since there are so many of them. The way I see it, is that governments in the US have no need to protect the poor from the consequences of their own stupid choices, even if it is ethically the right thing to do.

johnnymonster 12y ago
We live in a legal society that allows anyone to chop off their own hand. I see it as both good and bad in a lot of ways.
Meekro 12y ago
When the government deliberately keeps people uneducated, then I agree with you -- it's unethical to force people into that rut and then take advantage of them for being there. But the government in the US is trying to get everyone educated -- not always effectively, though. I know some schools suck, I went to a public school in the middle of a ghetto. Many of the students came from impoverished families, and would routinely bite the hand that feeds them when it came to education -- by disrupting class, (very proudly) not doing their homework, and whatnot. Watching that kind of behavior day-after-day took away any sympathy I might have for the consequences of their actions.

johnnymonster 12y ago

I would be nice to see businesses focus on trying to help people to a solution rather than feeding their addiction. This business helping them buy material things is just as bad as the corner street drug dealer. They are just dealing legal items instead of illegal ones. If a business model were to come along that would help teach them how to attain what they want through financially responsible means instead of loan sharking, I believe it would be incredible for the impoverished society. I have been in this sort of situation and I know the mindset. You can not even understand how to set goals, to figure out how to better your future! You have no idea what to do, and these business prey on that mindset. However, if you had a business that taught how to save for items you need and want, how to set goals and put away money, it would greatly change these peoples lives!

gexla 12y ago

> Normal families have sofas, she says, and you’ll do what it takes to feel normal. This is the problem. They have certain expectations set as to what a "normal" life is. A big, fluffy, crap sofa. Park the thing in front of the T.V. and waste your time. Come to the Philippines, it's a great place to reset expectations. Personally, I would rather setup the "living room" in nomadic style. Throw a rug and some cushions on the floor. Maybe arrange them around a circular bamboo table on which you can set food on. Sit around that table and talk to your family and friends. > Some weeks, they couldn’t pay their cellphone bills. In the Philippines, people don't have cellphone bills. Nearly everyone goes prepaid.

SheepSlapper 12y ago

Reminds me a lot of the Sam Vimes Boots Theory: "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness." I know people that rent to own, and while part of me is screaming "WTF, save up for a couple of months" inside, another part understands the thought process that gets you things like couches NOW but at 4x the cost.

AtmaScout 12y ago
It seems like I've read something similar in a biography about Rockefeller. Thanks for sharing.
kwhitefoot 12y ago
Snap! Made the same comment just now. I often wonder how popular Pratchett's books are in the US and whether people see the parallels.

pseudometa 12y ago

This reminded me of how much more people pay for houses on loan vs with cash. If you pay using a loan, you may pay double the cost by the time it is paid off. The only plus side with a house is the possibility that the value will increase and offset the difference some. No matter how you look at it, that furniture will never increase in value.

rbcgerard 12y ago

Its interesting because: 1. there is a logical reason the stores charge what they do("some 75 percent of items are returned or repossessed within weeks of the transaction" Anyone care to calculate what the interest rate should be on a loan with a ~75% chance of default?) 2. The prices that stores charge are not a "good deal" and therefore increasing sales "hurts people" 3. Shouldn't people be allowed to make decisions that may be against their best interest - at least in the U.S. there is/was a national sense of personal freedom and self determination

agentultra 12y ago

I find it saddening that the commenters here are having trouble with being empathetic. People who are exploited don't need your advice. We all know that we can live in a lean-to made of spruce branches and dry pine needles if we had to. That's not the problem these people have. Maybe the commenters here offering their well-intentioned advice are unaware of the shame and guilt that goes with being poor. It is widely believed in popular culture that your financial situation and future are within your hands and beyond reasonable misfortunes, if you end up poor, it's self-inflicted: you mismanaged your money, you decided to have an alcohol addiction, you don't know how to follow safety procedures and lost your leg, you didn't study hard in school and save money to go to college. You didn't work hard enough. You're lazy. You're stupid. You smell. You could dress better. Blah blah blah. The problem is that these rent-to-own businesses exploit that shame and guilt. They're using some pretty under-handed tactics to convince economically disadvantaged people that they can afford these luxury goods they clearly cannot. They try to sound appealing by offering luxury goods to people who cannot otherwise afford them so that they can stop feeling like they are failures. They obscure the true cost of their payment plans with sticker prices that emphasize the lowest term prices and not the full cost (car advertisers like to show the lease-cost in the commercial but are required in most places I know to disclose the full price of the car in the ad). To say that these people are "stupid" for falling in with these businesses is ignorant of the predatory practices these businesses are using and the complicating factors which result in poverty.

gregatragenet2 12y ago

It is interesting how this thread is split between messages of 'they should make better decisions' and then the reply/response that absolves the decision-maker by stating that it's the fault of the 'stress of poverty', not the fault of the decision-maker. I think the reason more people make these short-sighted bad decisions is exactly because they're being told that being in poverty doesn't have anything to do with the personal decisions you make but your 'circumstance'. If we tell people this, what motivation do they have to make prudent long-term decisions at the expense of short-term gratification? What they decide as an individual doesn't matter, or so their told - and they are told that it's a 'societal' problem, that 'society' needs to address/fix, so again, where's the motivation to make sacrifices at an individual level to increase one's lot in life? Regardless of the reality - of the two statements "it's your decisions that affect your level of poverty" and "it's society's fault you are poor" - one of these statements empowers the individual to make better choices, and the other discourages it. PS: +1 to the folks who said garage sale / thrift store / second-hand couches. It's mind-boggling that anyone struggling w/ money would buy(/rent) new furniture.

kwhitefoot 12y ago

I think the point several people have made about wanting a 'normal' life is important. The relentless advertising of an unachievable life that American, and other countries', media saturates peoples lives with must be a factor. I am reasonably well off and have no money worries, live in a country where differences between rich and poor are small. I could easily afford to buy a USD 1500 sofa, I could even without any impact on my life pay the over USD 4k that the woman in the article will actually pay. But in fact I have never done either, the leather sofa I have cost me the equivalent of USD 100, in fact it cost me another USD 50 to have it delivered. The point is that the sofa does not make me feel that I am poor so I feel pressured to spend more money on it. In addition it's simply expensive to be poor as several people have pointed out, see Vimes Boots on http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Samuel_Vimes http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Samuel_Vimes