The Loser Pays It All

A song by ABBA

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting as much. I’ve been planning my wedding, which is quite a distracting affair.

As I said in the previous sentence, I’ve been planning my wedding. We just hired our photographer, and we received our invoice digitally, as one does. At the bottom of the invoice page where your payment options are, there is a clever little trick of industry: an up-to-$85 “Online Payment” fee.

Now, let’s just get the obvious part out of the way: this is bullshit.

I shouldn’t have to pay a fee for using a payment system when that is the only payment system available. That’s like putting me on a game show and telling me to choose a door, and behind the incorrect door there is a pit of snakes and needles, but there’s only one door and it’s incorrect.

One thing you ought to keep in mind, now that we are past the age of checks and cash, is that you can still ask most businesses if you can pay by cashier’s check. Because most businesses will still accept this. Obviously this is more of a pain because it requires you to go to a bank and purchase one. But most of us no longer carry checkbooks, and this is a better option than paying fees on everything we buy. Especially for the larger purchases where a 5% payment fee could amount to a couple hundred dollars.

But the biggest problem here isn’t the inconvenience, or the fee itself. It’s the redistribution of economic infrastructure to the consumer.

20 years ago, payment fees were considered a cost of doing business. If you couldn’t find a way to accept credit card payments, and handle checks, you as a company simply couldn’t do business. If you couldn’t find 19-year-olds who were willing to count out paper money and coins, you couldn’t do transactions. It was incumbent upon the business to handle the infrastructure of payments — the consumer never saw that side of the business. The consumer didn’t have to worry about it; it wasn’t the consumer’s problem. The consumer gave you money, you gave the consumer thing. And the receipt had two line items on it: thing, and taxes on thing.

Now it seems everywhere I go, there is a surcharge for services rendered, an inflation fee, a payment processing fee, a convenience tax for the very act of making a payment to the business I’m doing business with. The cost of payment infrastructure is being offloaded to the consumer. We have to pay for the privilege of buying things, so that companies can recoup the losses they tragically suffer by… doing business.

There are many reasons this is happening. One is that the whole economy is suffering a recessionary effect from inflation right now. No matter what graphs and charts economists place on your screen to convince you the consumer is fine, the consumer is not. Those graphs and charts make blatantly dishonest assumptions like poorly-constructed weighted indexes, ignoring exponentially increasing healthcare costs, ignoring the fact that homes are three times as expensive as they should be, and ignoring the consumer experience of being one emergency away from catastrophic financial straits. “The consumer is fine” is a very, very loose usage of English words by a class of people who are in fact fine and pay no cost for being so loose with English words.

Another reason is that businesses are essentially just seeing what they can get away with. It has become apparent in recent years that the U.S., at least, has lost its backbone. Consumers aren’t willing to boycott companies that treat them poorly, because we’ve forgotten how to do the act of going without. We want, we need, and we won’t wait.

That’s one thing I love about the stereotypical, or at least the historical, Texas or Boston attitude. Those people always had the backbone to tell you to fuck off when you tried to pull one over on them. There are plenty of negative things about those cultures as well — everything’s a trade-off — but at least they had the spine that we always thought of as inherently American. Businesses at this point, as well as universities (which are for-profit businesses) and every other institution in our lives, are basically just seeing how much they can get away with. They’re seeing how much of the economy they can make us, the consumer, pay for. So they can keep making the top 1% wealthier and keep hiring bureaucrats at inflated salaries to go to endless committee meetings and send 4 emails a week.

Which leads us to one final reason: that everyone in the U.S. thinks their business ought to make them wealthy. Most business owners have historically been looking for one thing: autonomy. That is, for instance, the desire of most U.S. immigrants. The ability to work for oneself, to follow one’s own orders, to not rely on some incompetent boss or some dictator to determine our work experience. Say what you will about immigrants, but sometimes they display more American attributes than Americans. And that attitude does not just exist in entrepreneurs — it’s also people with high degrees and very specialized jobs. These people wanted to escape the horrors and trivialities of corporate desk life and move onto something more alive. To work on something that allows them to exercise agency.

But we have become ungrateful for autonomy. We have looked over the shoulder of autonomy and seen the younger and prettier wealth. It seems every business owner thinks they ought to be able to take home an absolutely maximized profit margin. Every boss, every manager, every owner thinks they ought to be getting rich whether it makes financial sense for the enterprise or not. The American north star is no longer autonomy, it’s competitive wealth. It’s number-go-up. Even when that does not lead at all to an increase in happiness or prosperity on a personal basis. We can’t help ourselves. We want number to go up.

Look at executives of video game developers. Every year, they want to take home higher and higher pay packages. And what I want to say to those people is, Dude, you get to make video games for a living. That IS the compensation.

But no. It seems everybody wants to pinch their pennies and underpay their workers as much as possible, because they want the security and status that comes with more money for themselves. But their logic is backwards — when you adopt an extraction mindset, rather than a growth one (as we as an entire country have), your business will start going downhill immediately and almost invariably. The best businesses I know of overpay their employees and those employees produce outstanding results. Why? Because they want to. Because those outstanding results bring more and more customers. Because those outstanding results and those eager customers bring the security and status that bad owners try to extract through nuanceless brute force. Either everybody is getting rich, or only the CEO is getting rich. There is no in-between.

And this represents the larger trend across our country: the consumer is expected to bear the costs of economic vitality for far more than his own household.

I’m not an economic specialist (though I do work in finance), I’m a generalist. I’m not the guy who attaches 46 sources to an article. What I am is a person with common sense and an ability to see the output of systems. And our system right now places more and more of the weight of keeping the economy going on the shoulders of average people. People who not only can no longer access the American Dream, but are forced to subsidize it for those who can.

“But the average person today has a better quality of life than the kings of 400 years ago.” Yes, that is true. But the average person today is also, as we said before, one emergency away from having his life completely ruined by systems that he actively subsidizes. That has never happened before in this country. The biggest risks to your financial health are the very systems that were supposed to ensure your security in the first place. Education, healthcare, home ownership, and childcare.

Getting by today is not a test of skill, but of luck. If you get unlucky in the United States, you lose. You can spend 20 years dutifully paying into health insurance, suddenly have $190,000 of medical debt that you cannot pay off, and still be asked for tips everywhere you go.

And then you have to do the legwork of trying to put your doctors, your specialists, and your insurance adjusters in touch with each other to figure out whether someone is going to pay the bill. The runaround of getting medical bills paid is, again, outsourced to the free labor of the consumer. It’s comedy at a Shakespearean level that we can pay the salaries of all of these desk jockeys and still have to do their jobs for them.

The output of this system is a few wealthy people and a whole lot of very, very unlucky people. It’s hotels on Boardwalk with 200 million pieces on the board. That doesn’t seem like a very good system to me. That doesn’t seem like a system that any country should be jealous of. (Which is why they’re not, and they actively make fun of us.)

Every time someone turns an iPad to you at a checkout counter and asks if you’d like to tip, what they’re really asking is “please redistribute some of your wages to our employees, so we can have higher profit margins.” There doesn’t even have to be a moral reason to say no. You say no because that’s a bullshit thing to ask. You say no because it’s not your job to make sure the entire economy pays all of its employees enough money. You are a strong and special person, but you’re not that strong.

In Denmark or New Zealand, taxes are a cinch. The government informs you of how much you owe, they tell you “if everything here looks correct you don’t need to do anything,” and then you don’t do anything. In the United States, we subsidize an entire industry of tax preparers every year simply because those companies lobbied the U.S. government to make us. Tax preparation in the U.S. is little more than a jobs program that the citizen pays for.

It just seems like, as the U.S. gets older, government is growing bigger while simultaneously doing less and less for the citizen. Corporations are growing bigger and more powerful, and yet the consumer is somehow responsible for making sure they get by. The 24-year-old barista is reduced to the theatrics of turning away from the payment screen when it asks other struggling Americans to tip them — and neither of them can afford a home. Neither of them.

I’m not really sure what we can do about this, other than opting out of systems that no longer work where possible. For instance, don’t tell your kids to go to an $80,000-a-year school if they don’t have a pretty clear idea of what their career looks like. Tell them to go into plumbing instead. You can opt your way into debt later — but you can’t opt out once you have it. Not without bankruptcy, anyway.

Don’t tip people whose entire contribution to your meal was to turn around and hand it to you. Companies with an extraction mindset, or who aren’t good enough to grow, need to be allowed to fail. That’s the entire point of the free market. Hell is what gives Christianity its value, and failure is what gives the free market its value.

Opt into more community friendships, maybe a church, where you can share childcare responsibilities instead of paying the Childcare Economy most of your paycheck. Write to your Congressperson and say “Dear sir or madam, please help, because this is kinda bullshit. This doesn’t really work anymore.”

“You’ll miss the American, who deals sharply but cheats no one, who is tougher than the thugs and cleverer than the tricksters, who says ‘I can do it’ when others shrug, and who respects learning but is suspicious of those claiming to be learned, when the last one dies.” - a Twitter user named Kendric Tonn