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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 mea

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?
    - byEngineer 12y ago
      They have no family to rely upon and maybe borrow money from or get other help from them - because cultural marxism destroyed family. They don't have society that will laugh in their face when they do something as stupid as this - so they won't do it again - because political correctness doesn't allow us to criticize them in a harsh manner. PC being - of course - a construct of cultural marxism. Instead they have a culture where being poor is something to brag about. Everybody is supposed to do something about their wrong choices - from Mr. President to the Middle Class. It's not their fault. It is our fault. The Capitalist society fault - cultural marxism at works again. Maybe if we all here just laughed loud enough so other poor could hear it, maybe then it would be just unacceptable for them to do stupid things like this. Maybe, if they knew the society will not care if they waste $4k, they would be much more cautious. Maybe, other poor, need an example, so they don't do stuff like that. Maybe strong families, churches - shouldn't have been targeted for destruction. Because maybe they could help them. Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. And this story above is a classic example.
      - muuh-gnu 12y ago
        > Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. As you will observe, HN is throughly infected with the communist delusion, commonly observed with atheist intelectuals. People like us, who escaped communist shitholes, after having to witness how it degenerates whole societies like a cancer and therefore being allergic to the false "but but but we have to help!" siren call, will be attacked by the infected often for merely loudly pronouncing the word "communism", which the rabid marxists are trying to cover up like the plague. After escaping to the west precisely to escape the social trainwrecks caused by the communist fallacy, it is so sad having to watch the new home going down the same damn way as if they didnt have basically the rest of the planet as a cautionary tale.
- Joeboy 12y ago
  I find it hard to empathize because I just have no experience of whatever phenomenon is making these people go out and spend thousands of dollars on tat. I don't understand it any more than I understand rich people spending millions on shinier tat when they could be investing it in the search for an ebola vaccine. I can sympathize because clearly they're getting a shitty deal out of life, and I'm aware of various possible explanations as to why somebody with no money might want to buy expensive goods, but I can't really do empathy because the phenomenon is basically mysterious and counterintuitive to me.
- mbillie1 12y ago
  This thread is indeed alarmingly close to becoming a parody of itself: "Why don't poor people just make more money?"
  - brandonmenc 12y ago
    No, people are saying, "why don't these people just spend less money."
    - billmalarky 12y ago
      I would bet that there is a good answer for that besides the simple one that they are "just shitty people" that many are jumping to though. For example, maybe they don't think much about the future because they feel they have no good future regardless. So they take the hit to ease a little bit of the struggle. My point is that I suspect a lot of the "haters," so to speak, in this thread have never experienced hopelessness in their lives before.
- cheald 12y ago
  You're not considering that some of us may have actually been/are poor. My frustration at people throw their paycheck-to-paycheck earnings at Rent-a-centers isn't "oh, look at the stupid poors", it's "I've been there, and I know that you can get a $1500 couch for $50 cash if you are willing to get up at 5 AM on Saturday mornings and go hit garage sales." The article's presentation of "These people have no options except to be horrifically exploited" is wrong at best, maybe even dishonest. No matter how much money you make, spending beyond your means because you have to have luxuries you really can't afford is a bad financial play. I feel a lot of empathy for people who get caught in the RAC trap. They're digging themselves into a hole that they'll never escape from, and that's genuinely sad. But it's a fixable problem! They aren't victims of their circumstances, they're victims of their own consumerism. At the end of the day, each of us is responsible for what we choose to spend our earnings on, and if you choose to spend all your expendable income on instant gratification, that's your choice, and you get to own the consequences of that choice.
  - Delmania 12y ago
    How similar was your situation? Did you have a family you needed to support? A full time job?
    - MrZongle2 12y ago
      Wait, are you implying that the parent poster wasn't poor enough to appreciate the situation?
      - MadManE 12y ago
        This sounds like the kind of situation you would see on r/TumblrInAction. . . .
    - cheald 12y ago
      You realize that no matter how I answer this question, someone will say "Oh, you weren't as poor as X", and thus claim that I'm not qualified to empathize, right? I had a family and was self-employed, which meant no guarantee of stable income and self-employment insurance, plus self-employment taxes. My take home covered rent, food, and basic utilities - usually. We certainly couldn't afford new furniture or appliances. We ate at a 10-year-old kitchen table that cost $100 from a grocery store with 4 chairs, which were literally falling apart from use. My couch was second-hand from a garage sale. My car was a used one that I learned to repair myself because I couldn't afford to pay a mechanic to fix it for me. I could have "afforded" to rent furniture. I even looked at it at one point, did the math on it, and nope'd right out of there. My wife wasn't happy at all - she'd been campaigning for new furniture for a long time - but it was the right financial choice. I'm in a much more stable financial situation now, but my kitchen table is a used one that my wife and I stripped, sanded, and refinished ourselves. My entertainment center we got from some friends who were moving and didn't have room for it. My TV I picked up on the curb, and it cost me $35 for a new DLP bulb. My coffee table I got for $20 at a furniture outlet store. I still have the garage sale couch.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  HN does have a pretty clear libertarian bent, so I'm not surprised to see many expressing the idea that the responsibility lies 100% with the people doing the renting. The situation is a lot more nuanced for me: yes, the people doing the renting do have some responsibility for this, but: 1) I don't see responsibility-shifting as justification for scummy business practices. If what you do as a business is fundamentally scummy (even if legal) then you're a scumbag, period, and deserve to be called out and taunted (and, if it were up to me, regulated out of business). The people running these rent-to-own companies (like most payday loan places, underhanded adware software pushers, etc) are scumbags and I wish the worst kind of bad karma on them, though sadly I don't actually believe in karma. 2) I don't fully understand how someone could have a total lack of empathy for the renters here, though I'm not surprised to see it. If this were a story about some startup founder who just as stupidly maxed all of his personal credit on some startup (ignoring the obvious math of how likely he is to fail, not entirely different from how some are blaming these renters for ignoring the math), there would be a lot more sympathy here, I think, due to relatability (mere exposure effect). Bad decisions are not something only poor people make, they just happen to pay a much higher (normalized) price for bad financial decisions than the rest of us because they are already so close to having nothing.
  - MadManE 12y ago
    Bad decisions make people poor. Being poor doesn't cause you to make bad decisions.
    - henrikgs 12y ago
      Except it probably does. There are a lot of research suggesting that being poor is stressful and mentally draining, rendering you more likely to make poor decisions.
    - kwhitefoot 12y ago
      Of course it does. In many cases you end up with no way to make the good decisions effective. I've never been what you might call seriously poor but I was unemployed for a few months after university and while the state did pay me a small benefit and I am not a big spender I quickly reached a point where I couldn't afford to put petrol in my car (a very frugal Mini) and not long afterward could not afford bus fares. This constrains your life decisions like eating healthy food can be impossible to make not because you can't afford the food but because you cannot make the journey to the shop, buying a USD 50 dollar sofa can be can be difficult because you can't afford the fuel to travel around town looking for the bargain. Of course all these things can be done but they require a greater degree of organization of the poor than it requires of someone who already has all that he needs to just decide to buy something with money that doesn't matter. If you have a minimum wage job you will inevitably be more stressed and stress leads to bad decisions.
- Strang 12y ago
  This may be wildly off-topic, but I think this kind of disconnect is caused by a modern conflation of the concepts of "society" and "government". I think society should be against these businesses. I think government should leave them be.
NovaS1X 12y ago
I think a lot of people have not been in this situation or have not really experienced the level of poverty that these people live. Managing money is not that hard. Abbot also mentions that she knows how much she's paying, she's not blind to it. I think what people don't understand is the intense amount of stress that poverty causes and how it affects your judgement. When you're in a spot so bad that you have maybe $20 a week for food and have bills and collections wanting everything you have, simple things like a new couch or speakers look like an escape, almost therapeutic, when you have nothing. The desire to be "normal" and come across as relevant in society can be so strong. You can't look at the couch as just a couch, these people are looking at an escape from their lives. I highly suspect that the majority of HNers haven't been subject to a level of poverty that affects the mind like this. I can't take someone, who talks about the lives of the impoverished when they can take a degree, savings account, and probably a stable family/upbringing to the argument seriously.
- Delmania 12y ago
  "When you're in a spot so bad that you have maybe $20 a week for food and have bills and collections wanting everything you have, simple things like a new couch or speakers look like an escape, almost therapeutic, when you have nothing." This is something that most well off people have a hard time understanding. I remember well a story on NPR where a younger sibling scrimped and saved to buy his older brother a Nintendo DS, only to have an older and richer neighbor come over and berate him for wasting his money like that. When you're struggling every day to make ends meet, constantly worried about the future, and playing mental gymnastics to determine which bills you can afford to pay and still have food, even the smallest luxury is a relief.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    I think we're conflating two different things here: there's a desire amongst the very poor to spend money on nonessential sources of digital entertainment which isn't necessarily that irrational. You'll find that holds in places where people earn far less than the US minimum wage and would never in their wildest dreams expect to own a sofa, a TV more than 17" across or even a trailer with actual glass in the windows; they're still very proud of their almost-smartphone and spend a lot of time glued to their CRT TV screen. There are also people with relatively limited education and intelligence and relatively high stress levels binging on furniture every time they walk into the store to make payments on the last item because they're extremely susceptible to the marketing messages that "normal" American families replace their sofas on a regular basis, and deferred payments are easier to keep up with.
applecore 12y ago
Unfortunately, the poor usually understand what they're agreeing to; they simply don't have any other choice.
- muuh-gnu 12y ago
  They always have a choice, they are just weak-willed and have a ridiculously high time preference. Being poor isnt primarily an inability to make money, it is an inability to save money and delay gratification. Being poor is a mental state. They'd likely end up poor even if they won a lottery.
  - Noted 12y ago
    You can't save money you don't make. There's a lot more to poverty than just weak-willed people.
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    >They always have a choice, they are just weak-willed To be fair, when you're down it's hard to pull yourself back up. Especially when you see no future for yourself, why not "treat yourself" to a simple luxury here and there. These people aren't thinking about the future because they don't believe they have one. >Being poor isnt primarily an inability to make money, it is an inability to save money and delay gratification. I disagree. The primary reason these folks are poor is their inability to make money. Will they ever become wealthy (high net worth) without the ability to save money and delay gratification? No. But there are many in the middle class who are low net worth due to spending but do not live a "poor" lifestyle with all the burdens it entails like these people do. The first step to financial security is getting the skills necessary to bring in income sufficient to cover a modest life and then save. These people are simply not able to bring in that level of income. Even if they scrimped and saved a large portion of their paycheck, they would still be wiped out quickly given any major disruption.
  - pluma 12y ago
    It's easy to talk about delaying gratification when you have a relatively realistic prospect of eventually achieving that gratification. We're talking about people who know there's no realistic way to achieve that gratification without making bad decisions. It's not about how long you need to wait to be able to afford something without cutting off your leg. It's about which leg you're willing to cut off to afford the other one.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> These people sign contracts without understanding what they are agreeing to... That's inconsistent with what the article states: > Abbott wanted a love seat-sofa combo, and she knew it might rip her budget. > Their decision to spring for a new sofa set was, if anything, a bet on the most optimistic arc for their family. Donald was getting regular work, sometimes making $500 in a week, paid by the load to haul pureed chicken guts — used for pet food — to factories across the South. If he could keep up the pace, they’d be okay. > Abbott has spent eight months now with the sofa set, and some days, she can shrug off the costs. She’ll sink into the cushions just before her kids get out of school and say she wouldn’t trade the feeling “for a million bucks.” Normal families have sofas, she says, and you’ll do what it takes to feel normal. > Abbott and Donald smoked a cigarette in the bathroom and sorted through the grim math. It was less than they were used to, but sickness and an oversupply of drivers had left Donald with the shrunken paycheck. > “We’ve always talked about the benefits and costs,” she said on the drive home. “Because with a family you can’t just say, ‘I want this, I’m going to get it.’ But growing up having the chair, the recliner, the love seat, the couch and everything, you just get used to the normal stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to break from the normal stuff and get to reality.” It's clear from the article that the Abbotts made a considered decision. It might not have been a financially prudent one, but not all considered decisions are good ones. I find it ironic that you call for empathy when the not-so-subtle suggestion in your comment is that folks like the Abbotts are ignorant. They very clearly are not.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  >I find it ironic that you call for empathy when the not-so-subtle suggestion in your comment is that folks like the Abbotts are ignorant. You make a good point and I should have been more clear in my post. I don't mean that they didn't understand the dollar amounts in question, but it's also clear that the long term effect of paying for the furniture is worse than they expected. There's no way for them to "get ahead" - just many chances to fall behind.
sheltgor 12y ago
That, unfortunately, kind of comes with the territory of a site where most users likely don't face those issues on a daily basis. I, fortunately, can say that I'm privilaged enough to have not faced the scenario described in the article, though through work over the years I've gotten to know a number of people in a very similar situation. You get a minimum wage job, say at a grocery store, because, well, you literally have no other options. You couldn't focus in high school, maybe you dealt with drug issues, had ADHD, got pregnant in a family that wouldn't permit abortion (or in one of the many states where you have to drive hundreds of miles, have multiple appointments on separate days, and jump through a variety of other hoops). By the time you're in your 20s, you have no high school education and even if you want to turn your life around you need to put in extensive effort to, say, get a GED, go to community college, etc. All while working full time in order to just have food on the table and, if you're lucky enough to have moved away from your parents, a roof over your head. With the job itself it becomes tough. Say you make $400 a week before taxes working $10 bucks an hour at a grocery store. A fair chunk of that is going to go towards food, and frankly that's not going to be very healthy food for the amount of money you're able to spend and the time you have to prepare it. You've then got to spend 10% of that every couple weeks so you have enough gas to get to work, probably payments on a cheap used car (and numerous repairs that will likely have to come on credit), rent, cigarettes (its an addiction, keep that in mind) and god knows what random medical or accidental expenses come up will eat up pretty much the rest. IF you're lucky you might be able to put a few bucks in a savings account, but chances are when you have those accidental expenses you'll want to use some of those savings just so you don't have to put it all on credit and add more to your reoccurring expenses. To make matters worse, you have very little control over when you actually work. Most minimum wage employers give you a two week schedule at most, sometimes just a one week, often determine how many hours you have with that short of notice, and have wildly different hours. Working at a Safeway recently I dealt with, say, 35 hours during the week, some late night shifts from 3:00pm-11:30, but then eight hours later being called back in to help open at 7:30 (yes, they can do that). Further, that store only did one week scheduling, so you wouldn't even know until Thursday if you were working THAT UPCOMING SUNDAY. And furthermore they frequently took advantage of loopholes in the contract to have their employees working six, seven, eight, sometimes even ten days straight with such irregular hours. The ability to sign up for classes, make it a regular routine to, say, learn some new skill, becomes winnowed down to nothing. To make matters worse, you have little opportunity to move somewhere where there might be better opportunities. There's a reason wealthier people are much more likely to move away. You need a deposit plus first and last months rent anywhere new you're moving, but with how little you're able to save that's a huge burden to come up with. Furthermore, the sheer cost of moving, usually in the order of thousands of dollars, is even greater. Plus, if you do chose to do that, you're leaving the only real support network you may be lucky enough to have: your family. So before those in this comment thread disdain them for making the choice, however illogical, to try and have some sense of normalcy in their lives (or at least the normalcy projected ad nauseum by the American media and in the ad campaigns of the very places they're working), consider the sort of stress they're already under.
buyx 12y ago
I think that many are dumb and ignorant. A ninth grade dropout usually won't make the same choices as a college grad. The question is, should they be protected from the consequences of their undeniable dumbness and ignorance? I would answer yes.

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?
  - byEngineer 12y ago
    They have no family to rely upon and maybe borrow money from or get other help from them - because cultural marxism destroyed family. They don't have society that will laugh in their face when they do something as stupid as this - so they won't do it again - because political correctness doesn't allow us to criticize them in a harsh manner. PC being - of course - a construct of cultural marxism. Instead they have a culture where being poor is something to brag about. Everybody is supposed to do something about their wrong choices - from Mr. President to the Middle Class. It's not their fault. It is our fault. The Capitalist society fault - cultural marxism at works again. Maybe if we all here just laughed loud enough so other poor could hear it, maybe then it would be just unacceptable for them to do stupid things like this. Maybe, if they knew the society will not care if they waste $4k, they would be much more cautious. Maybe, other poor, need an example, so they don't do stuff like that. Maybe strong families, churches - shouldn't have been targeted for destruction. Because maybe they could help them. Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. And this story above is a classic example.
    - muuh-gnu 12y ago
      > Where I'm coming from we have this saying: communism is all about fixing problems that it created in the first place. As you will observe, HN is throughly infected with the communist delusion, commonly observed with atheist intelectuals. People like us, who escaped communist shitholes, after having to witness how it degenerates whole societies like a cancer and therefore being allergic to the false "but but but we have to help!" siren call, will be attacked by the infected often for merely loudly pronouncing the word "communism", which the rabid marxists are trying to cover up like the plague. After escaping to the west precisely to escape the social trainwrecks caused by the communist fallacy, it is so sad having to watch the new home going down the same damn way as if they didnt have basically the rest of the planet as a cautionary tale.
Joeboy 12y ago
I find it hard to empathize because I just have no experience of whatever phenomenon is making these people go out and spend thousands of dollars on tat. I don't understand it any more than I understand rich people spending millions on shinier tat when they could be investing it in the search for an ebola vaccine. I can sympathize because clearly they're getting a shitty deal out of life, and I'm aware of various possible explanations as to why somebody with no money might want to buy expensive goods, but I can't really do empathy because the phenomenon is basically mysterious and counterintuitive to me.
mbillie1 12y ago
This thread is indeed alarmingly close to becoming a parody of itself: "Why don't poor people just make more money?"
- brandonmenc 12y ago
  No, people are saying, "why don't these people just spend less money."
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    I would bet that there is a good answer for that besides the simple one that they are "just shitty people" that many are jumping to though. For example, maybe they don't think much about the future because they feel they have no good future regardless. So they take the hit to ease a little bit of the struggle. My point is that I suspect a lot of the "haters," so to speak, in this thread have never experienced hopelessness in their lives before.
cheald 12y ago
You're not considering that some of us may have actually been/are poor. My frustration at people throw their paycheck-to-paycheck earnings at Rent-a-centers isn't "oh, look at the stupid poors", it's "I've been there, and I know that you can get a $1500 couch for $50 cash if you are willing to get up at 5 AM on Saturday mornings and go hit garage sales." The article's presentation of "These people have no options except to be horrifically exploited" is wrong at best, maybe even dishonest. No matter how much money you make, spending beyond your means because you have to have luxuries you really can't afford is a bad financial play. I feel a lot of empathy for people who get caught in the RAC trap. They're digging themselves into a hole that they'll never escape from, and that's genuinely sad. But it's a fixable problem! They aren't victims of their circumstances, they're victims of their own consumerism. At the end of the day, each of us is responsible for what we choose to spend our earnings on, and if you choose to spend all your expendable income on instant gratification, that's your choice, and you get to own the consequences of that choice.
- Delmania 12y ago
  How similar was your situation? Did you have a family you needed to support? A full time job?
  - MrZongle2 12y ago
    Wait, are you implying that the parent poster wasn't poor enough to appreciate the situation?
    - MadManE 12y ago
      This sounds like the kind of situation you would see on r/TumblrInAction. . . .
  - cheald 12y ago
    You realize that no matter how I answer this question, someone will say "Oh, you weren't as poor as X", and thus claim that I'm not qualified to empathize, right? I had a family and was self-employed, which meant no guarantee of stable income and self-employment insurance, plus self-employment taxes. My take home covered rent, food, and basic utilities - usually. We certainly couldn't afford new furniture or appliances. We ate at a 10-year-old kitchen table that cost $100 from a grocery store with 4 chairs, which were literally falling apart from use. My couch was second-hand from a garage sale. My car was a used one that I learned to repair myself because I couldn't afford to pay a mechanic to fix it for me. I could have "afforded" to rent furniture. I even looked at it at one point, did the math on it, and nope'd right out of there. My wife wasn't happy at all - she'd been campaigning for new furniture for a long time - but it was the right financial choice. I'm in a much more stable financial situation now, but my kitchen table is a used one that my wife and I stripped, sanded, and refinished ourselves. My entertainment center we got from some friends who were moving and didn't have room for it. My TV I picked up on the curb, and it cost me $35 for a new DLP bulb. My coffee table I got for $20 at a furniture outlet store. I still have the garage sale couch.
georgemcbay 12y ago
HN does have a pretty clear libertarian bent, so I'm not surprised to see many expressing the idea that the responsibility lies 100% with the people doing the renting. The situation is a lot more nuanced for me: yes, the people doing the renting do have some responsibility for this, but: 1) I don't see responsibility-shifting as justification for scummy business practices. If what you do as a business is fundamentally scummy (even if legal) then you're a scumbag, period, and deserve to be called out and taunted (and, if it were up to me, regulated out of business). The people running these rent-to-own companies (like most payday loan places, underhanded adware software pushers, etc) are scumbags and I wish the worst kind of bad karma on them, though sadly I don't actually believe in karma. 2) I don't fully understand how someone could have a total lack of empathy for the renters here, though I'm not surprised to see it. If this were a story about some startup founder who just as stupidly maxed all of his personal credit on some startup (ignoring the obvious math of how likely he is to fail, not entirely different from how some are blaming these renters for ignoring the math), there would be a lot more sympathy here, I think, due to relatability (mere exposure effect). Bad decisions are not something only poor people make, they just happen to pay a much higher (normalized) price for bad financial decisions than the rest of us because they are already so close to having nothing.
- MadManE 12y ago
  Bad decisions make people poor. Being poor doesn't cause you to make bad decisions.
  - henrikgs 12y ago
    Except it probably does. There are a lot of research suggesting that being poor is stressful and mentally draining, rendering you more likely to make poor decisions.
  - kwhitefoot 12y ago
    Of course it does. In many cases you end up with no way to make the good decisions effective. I've never been what you might call seriously poor but I was unemployed for a few months after university and while the state did pay me a small benefit and I am not a big spender I quickly reached a point where I couldn't afford to put petrol in my car (a very frugal Mini) and not long afterward could not afford bus fares. This constrains your life decisions like eating healthy food can be impossible to make not because you can't afford the food but because you cannot make the journey to the shop, buying a USD 50 dollar sofa can be can be difficult because you can't afford the fuel to travel around town looking for the bargain. Of course all these things can be done but they require a greater degree of organization of the poor than it requires of someone who already has all that he needs to just decide to buy something with money that doesn't matter. If you have a minimum wage job you will inevitably be more stressed and stress leads to bad decisions.
Strang 12y ago
This may be wildly off-topic, but I think this kind of disconnect is caused by a modern conflation of the concepts of "society" and "government". I think society should be against these businesses. I think government should leave them be.

NovaS1X 12y ago

I think a lot of people have not been in this situation or have not really experienced the level of poverty that these people live. Managing money is not that hard. Abbot also mentions that she knows how much she's paying, she's not blind to it. I think what people don't understand is the intense amount of stress that poverty causes and how it affects your judgement. When you're in a spot so bad that you have maybe $20 a week for food and have bills and collections wanting everything you have, simple things like a new couch or speakers look like an escape, almost therapeutic, when you have nothing. The desire to be "normal" and come across as relevant in society can be so strong. You can't look at the couch as just a couch, these people are looking at an escape from their lives. I highly suspect that the majority of HNers haven't been subject to a level of poverty that affects the mind like this. I can't take someone, who talks about the lives of the impoverished when they can take a degree, savings account, and probably a stable family/upbringing to the argument seriously.

Delmania 12y ago
"When you're in a spot so bad that you have maybe $20 a week for food and have bills and collections wanting everything you have, simple things like a new couch or speakers look like an escape, almost therapeutic, when you have nothing." This is something that most well off people have a hard time understanding. I remember well a story on NPR where a younger sibling scrimped and saved to buy his older brother a Nintendo DS, only to have an older and richer neighbor come over and berate him for wasting his money like that. When you're struggling every day to make ends meet, constantly worried about the future, and playing mental gymnastics to determine which bills you can afford to pay and still have food, even the smallest luxury is a relief.
- notahacker 12y ago
  I think we're conflating two different things here: there's a desire amongst the very poor to spend money on nonessential sources of digital entertainment which isn't necessarily that irrational. You'll find that holds in places where people earn far less than the US minimum wage and would never in their wildest dreams expect to own a sofa, a TV more than 17" across or even a trailer with actual glass in the windows; they're still very proud of their almost-smartphone and spend a lot of time glued to their CRT TV screen. There are also people with relatively limited education and intelligence and relatively high stress levels binging on furniture every time they walk into the store to make payments on the last item because they're extremely susceptible to the marketing messages that "normal" American families replace their sofas on a regular basis, and deferred payments are easier to keep up with.

applecore 12y ago

Unfortunately, the poor usually understand what they're agreeing to; they simply don't have any other choice.

muuh-gnu 12y ago
They always have a choice, they are just weak-willed and have a ridiculously high time preference. Being poor isnt primarily an inability to make money, it is an inability to save money and delay gratification. Being poor is a mental state. They'd likely end up poor even if they won a lottery.
- Noted 12y ago
  You can't save money you don't make. There's a lot more to poverty than just weak-willed people.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  >They always have a choice, they are just weak-willed To be fair, when you're down it's hard to pull yourself back up. Especially when you see no future for yourself, why not "treat yourself" to a simple luxury here and there. These people aren't thinking about the future because they don't believe they have one. >Being poor isnt primarily an inability to make money, it is an inability to save money and delay gratification. I disagree. The primary reason these folks are poor is their inability to make money. Will they ever become wealthy (high net worth) without the ability to save money and delay gratification? No. But there are many in the middle class who are low net worth due to spending but do not live a "poor" lifestyle with all the burdens it entails like these people do. The first step to financial security is getting the skills necessary to bring in income sufficient to cover a modest life and then save. These people are simply not able to bring in that level of income. Even if they scrimped and saved a large portion of their paycheck, they would still be wiped out quickly given any major disruption.
- pluma 12y ago
  It's easy to talk about delaying gratification when you have a relatively realistic prospect of eventually achieving that gratification. We're talking about people who know there's no realistic way to achieve that gratification without making bad decisions. It's not about how long you need to wait to be able to afford something without cutting off your leg. It's about which leg you're willing to cut off to afford the other one.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

> These people sign contracts without understanding what they are agreeing to... That's inconsistent with what the article states: > Abbott wanted a love seat-sofa combo, and she knew it might rip her budget. > Their decision to spring for a new sofa set was, if anything, a bet on the most optimistic arc for their family. Donald was getting regular work, sometimes making $500 in a week, paid by the load to haul pureed chicken guts — used for pet food — to factories across the South. If he could keep up the pace, they’d be okay. > Abbott has spent eight months now with the sofa set, and some days, she can shrug off the costs. She’ll sink into the cushions just before her kids get out of school and say she wouldn’t trade the feeling “for a million bucks.” Normal families have sofas, she says, and you’ll do what it takes to feel normal. > Abbott and Donald smoked a cigarette in the bathroom and sorted through the grim math. It was less than they were used to, but sickness and an oversupply of drivers had left Donald with the shrunken paycheck. > “We’ve always talked about the benefits and costs,” she said on the drive home. “Because with a family you can’t just say, ‘I want this, I’m going to get it.’ But growing up having the chair, the recliner, the love seat, the couch and everything, you just get used to the normal stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to break from the normal stuff and get to reality.” It's clear from the article that the Abbotts made a considered decision. It might not have been a financially prudent one, but not all considered decisions are good ones. I find it ironic that you call for empathy when the not-so-subtle suggestion in your comment is that folks like the Abbotts are ignorant. They very clearly are not.

aeturnum 12y ago
>I find it ironic that you call for empathy when the not-so-subtle suggestion in your comment is that folks like the Abbotts are ignorant. You make a good point and I should have been more clear in my post. I don't mean that they didn't understand the dollar amounts in question, but it's also clear that the long term effect of paying for the furniture is worse than they expected. There's no way for them to "get ahead" - just many chances to fall behind.

sheltgor 12y ago

That, unfortunately, kind of comes with the territory of a site where most users likely don't face those issues on a daily basis. I, fortunately, can say that I'm privilaged enough to have not faced the scenario described in the article, though through work over the years I've gotten to know a number of people in a very similar situation. You get a minimum wage job, say at a grocery store, because, well, you literally have no other options. You couldn't focus in high school, maybe you dealt with drug issues, had ADHD, got pregnant in a family that wouldn't permit abortion (or in one of the many states where you have to drive hundreds of miles, have multiple appointments on separate days, and jump through a variety of other hoops). By the time you're in your 20s, you have no high school education and even if you want to turn your life around you need to put in extensive effort to, say, get a GED, go to community college, etc. All while working full time in order to just have food on the table and, if you're lucky enough to have moved away from your parents, a roof over your head. With the job itself it becomes tough. Say you make $400 a week before taxes working $10 bucks an hour at a grocery store. A fair chunk of that is going to go towards food, and frankly that's not going to be very healthy food for the amount of money you're able to spend and the time you have to prepare it. You've then got to spend 10% of that every couple weeks so you have enough gas to get to work, probably payments on a cheap used car (and numerous repairs that will likely have to come on credit), rent, cigarettes (its an addiction, keep that in mind) and god knows what random medical or accidental expenses come up will eat up pretty much the rest. IF you're lucky you might be able to put a few bucks in a savings account, but chances are when you have those accidental expenses you'll want to use some of those savings just so you don't have to put it all on credit and add more to your reoccurring expenses. To make matters worse, you have very little control over when you actually work. Most minimum wage employers give you a two week schedule at most, sometimes just a one week, often determine how many hours you have with that short of notice, and have wildly different hours. Working at a Safeway recently I dealt with, say, 35 hours during the week, some late night shifts from 3:00pm-11:30, but then eight hours later being called back in to help open at 7:30 (yes, they can do that). Further, that store only did one week scheduling, so you wouldn't even know until Thursday if you were working THAT UPCOMING SUNDAY. And furthermore they frequently took advantage of loopholes in the contract to have their employees working six, seven, eight, sometimes even ten days straight with such irregular hours. The ability to sign up for classes, make it a regular routine to, say, learn some new skill, becomes winnowed down to nothing. To make matters worse, you have little opportunity to move somewhere where there might be better opportunities. There's a reason wealthier people are much more likely to move away. You need a deposit plus first and last months rent anywhere new you're moving, but with how little you're able to save that's a huge burden to come up with. Furthermore, the sheer cost of moving, usually in the order of thousands of dollars, is even greater. Plus, if you do chose to do that, you're leaving the only real support network you may be lucky enough to have: your family. So before those in this comment thread disdain them for making the choice, however illogical, to try and have some sense of normalcy in their lives (or at least the normalcy projected ad nauseum by the American media and in the ad campaigns of the very places they're working), consider the sort of stress they're already under.

buyx 12y ago

I think that many are dumb and ignorant. A ninth grade dropout usually won't make the same choices as a college grad. The question is, should they be protected from the consequences of their undeniable dumbness and ignorance? I would answer yes.