Buy now, pay dearly? (update)

This message comes from Bloomberg, join Jason Leopold and Matt Topig as they access government records and reveal them to listeners every Tuesday. Don't miss an episode of Disclosure, available on your favorite podcast app. This is Planet Money, from NPR. This is the story of how Amelia Schmarzo fell into a kind of rabbit hole, one that involved a lot of online shopping. But the story isn't about the stuff she bought as much as the new way she found to pay for that stuff. It starts a couple of years ago in the spring of 2020 when Amelia found herself, like so many of us, locked down at home, bored, scared, going a little stir crazy. I was like, who am I? What is going on? Like, oh my gosh, I hit a midlife crisis at the age of 20. I was like, I need to find new passions that I can new hobbies to keep myself busy. So Amelia's a junior in college, she's living in an apartment in San Diego, and she started doing these at home exercise videos that were made by influencers she saw on social media. Good morning everyone and welcome back to my channel and today's video. I have a belly pound, a 10 pound and a 20 pound waist. I like swear, either what, make sure, but grow. And then I found influencers who follow these influencers and so that is how I've kind of gone, to the realm of getting influenced by influencers. That's how you fell under the influence. Absolutely. Amelia says the lives of these trendy jet-setting zoomers just felt so glamorous. And she's like, maybe if I get the right clothes and accessories, maybe my life could be more like that. I mean, we've all been there. They look pretty, they look confident. I want those words. People to describe me as that. A lot of the influencers Amelia is following are constantly showing off their new outfits. That's my channel. Today I have a summer clothing haul for you guys. Then there'll be a link to the websites where you can buy exactly what they're wearing. And in one of these videos, Amelia sees the bikini. Oh yeah, it was literally like a white and brown tie-dye bikini. It doesn't sound that special, but to Amelia, it felt like the first step to reinventing herself. So she clicked the link. The price was somewhere around $200 for the bikini. And had you ever spent that kind of money on a piece of clothing before? No, not even clothes. But then Amelia notices an offer in small type just below the total. Four interest-free payments of $4,199 with after pay. It just felt so cheap, you know? I was like, that is so affordable. $4,199. And if I sat there and I genuinely was like $4,199 times four, I probably wouldn't have bought it. But I was like, oh, I'm easily going to get $41 next month. Like, that's nothing to worry about. So suddenly, the most expensive garment you've kind of considered buying feels like it's actually a bit of a bargain? It really does. You're like, I just lucked into a kind of a steal. I'm like, wow, I'm paying $41 for $200 bikini. Like, I am a genius. This was Amelia's first experience with a kind of payment called by now pay later. After an extremely cursory credit check, the kind that won't affect her credit score, she's approved, clicks the purchase button, the company after pay charges her card for the first installment. They accept credit or debit, she chooses credit. And the bikini is on its way. The process was that simple. And so a few days later, when she sees another influencer showing off something else she liked. So I guess we'll start off with my most favorite pair of sneakers that I own. Amelia clicks the link. And again, she sees that by now pay later option. It literally made the price like, I kid you not like $8. So in that mindset, I was like, oh my gosh, I can afford the world. And so I, that's why I threw in that swimsuit and I threw in the jacket and the jeans. And hit me. Yeah, right. I might put them all in the card. Yeah. And my total was literally like $20. So how does this pick up? Like, is it over the next like couple of weeks? Is it months? I would say days to be honest. Before she knows it, Amelia has fallen into a kind of shopping spiral. I got like a whole bunch of like really nice jeans from Maurizia. She got fancy sweatpants, sweatshirts. Because sweatshirts were super in right because you weren't leaving the house. Like a bunch of new shoes. Brand new high heels, Jordans, Yeezies. Buying stuff online was the only thing that really gave me that like adrenaline. You know what I mean? When it came in the mail because there was nothing else going on, it was so exciting. It felt like Christmas. Amelia says all of the packages arriving on her doorstep felt kind of like gifts. Like some mysterious stranger was footing the bill for everything on her list, just out of the goodness of their corporate heart. I'm not going to lie, it felt free. Like it literally felt like free money because I didn't see it. It wasn't cash. I don't know, it just felt like it was never going to catch up. It just all felt like monopoly money. So you're like watching Tiger King, mashing that that buy now pay later button. Life was good. What was the first sign that trouble might be brewing? I don't think about it literally until I got an email from the discover saying your statement is ready to be viewed. One thing to know about Amelia, before she started using buy now pay later, she was pretty allergic to using her credit card at all. It was what her dad helped set up for essentials and emergencies. And her statement had only ever been a few hundred dollars at the very most. But this time, I saw that it was two thousand dollars, which was my limit. And then I saw my debit card went from seven hundred dollars to like twenty dollars. And that's when I was like, I am going to throw up. I'm like, how did this happen? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazzy. And I'm Taylor Washington. At its most basic, alone is a way to get money now in return for a little bit extra. Or a lot when you pay it back down the road. That's been true as far back as, I don't know, ancient Babylon. But all of a sudden over the past couple years, there's been an explosion of new companies offering what is essentially free money, a no-interest loan. Today on the show, what exactly is buy now pay later? How it works and why it seems to be everywhere. And should we be worried? We originally reported the story of Amelia back in 2022. Since then, buy now pay later has continued to spread across the economy. And people are using it for all sorts of basic necessities as living costs shoot up. All right, as credit scores are fault, especially among Gen Z. So today, we're going to revisit our original episode on how companies like Clarner and Afterpay and Affirm make money. And we'll get an update on Amelia in 2025. We'll find out exactly who is using buy now pay later now. And if it's ever a good deal for you, for Amelia, for the economy. This message comes from Ted Business, a podcast from Ted. Whether you want to lead a company or just beat burnout, there's a Ted talk for that. Ted Business features fresh ideas on how to level up in your career and work at your best. Find Ted Business wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Bloomberg. Odd Lots is a podcast that explores the most interesting and relevant topics in finance, markets, and economics. Join the conversation with Joe Weiss and Thal and Tracy Alloway every Monday and Thursday. Listen to Odd Lots wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Taylor Washington, you are a producer here on the show. Yep. And you first brought up buy now pay later in one of our editorial meetings a while back. Yes, so I heard about it a while ago because all of a sudden I saw a ton of people my age, you know, fellow Zoomers were using it and they were going on these crazy shopping sprees all over TikTok. A lot of people jumping in head first, just like Amelia. And so it seems like something we should look into. Right. Okay, and we will get back to Amelia's story in a bit. But Taylor, what I remember from when you first pitched this was that a lot of us kind of knew what you were talking about. Like we'd seen these buy now pay later options online. But nobody really understood like how it actually works. Yes, so people started talking about payday loans or rent to own or layaway because with layaway, you also pay in installments, but you don't get the thing until it's paid off. Yeah, that's what buy now pay later feels like good old fashioned layaway. This is Terry Bradford. She's a payments expert at the Kansas City Fed. And a couple years ago, she and her colleague Juliane. Liana Kasai also work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. They teamed up to start looking into buy now pay later. How would you kind of describe your dynamic as a duo? Are you more like a Batman and Robin style thing? Are you like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson? You know what? I would say we're Woodward and Bernstein. How about that? Ooh, yeah. Those are terms that we can understand. Okay, so when our financial Woodward and Bernstein started looking into buy now pay later a couple years ago, the business model was still a bit of a mystery to them. But one thing was clear. It's credit by another name. That's what it is, yeah. So it's not unlike I guess buying a car or buying a house. The difference is you aren't paying interest, you know. It almost is like too good to be true. Too good to be true because here's what most buy now pay later companies are offering. They're saying as long as you are able to clear a pretty low bar, like a soft credit check that won't show up on your credit score, they will spot you the money for whatever you're buying. You agree to pay them back in four installments? They collect the money from whatever bank account or debit or credit card you want in those payments are all interest-free. Which raises a pretty big question. If most customers are not paying any interest. How are you making money on this? Interest-free loans. Where's the value proposition in that? So where was the money coming from, right? Right. Where was the money coming from? Lending money is usually a big money maker because of some combination of interest and fees. But when Terry and Julian peaked under the hood of the business model, not only are the companies not charging interest, the fees generally aren't super high either. So for customers, as long as they don't buy more than they can afford, which is obviously a big if, these loans can be a great deal. Basically the cheapest money you can get. I was always expecting this gotcha moment. Yeah. And it wasn't coming around. So I was very, I was like, where's the surprise? I was, you know, when you watch a scary movie and you could hear the suspenseful music and then there's Michael Myers behind the door. That's what I was expecting. The gotcha moment was not what they expected. Instead of making money by gouging their customers with hidden fees, it turned out by now pay later companies were taking their cut from the other side of the transaction. From the businesses actually selling the goods. So it goes between four and as high as nine and a half percent, is what merchants are paying by now pay later firms. Credit card companies usually charge merchants anywhere from two to four percent. So by now pay later companies are often asking for a way bigger cut. So I just want to break this down clearly. They're saying we're going to charge you around double of what credit cards charge. Per item that you sell using our payment service. Yeah, it doesn't quite seem to jive does it. What makes it jive is that credit card charges are widely variable, depending on whether it's a master card or an AMX or a visa and whether there are rewards. It makes things harder to predict. Also, credit cards come with these pesky consumer protections that put businesses on the hook if customers complain. So if something goes wrong in the product that they bought broke or didn't perform to their satisfaction, they have the right to request a chargeback. And so the merchant could have that whole amount that they'd received withdrawn by the credit card company because the customer said the product was no good for them. Right. So if you've ever asked your credit card company for a refund because the thing you bought turned out to be junk, that's what she's talking about. That can be a big pain for businesses. But the biggest reason that businesses are signing up for buy now pay later is that it's helping them sell more stuff. For example, by bringing in a new pool of customers. Because what Terry and Julian saw as they dug through pitch decks and advertisements and influencer videos was that at first buy now pay later companies were targeting a pretty specific demographic. They wanted to offer small loans at the point of sale to reach people who don't usually buy on credit. Which is actually a lot of people. For example, people who don't have much of a credit history, people who have bad credit, or people like Amelia who grew up during and after financial crisis and are more reluctant to use credit cards at all. All of those people might not have bought anything without buy now pay later. So not only are businesses getting new customers, but many of those customers are young. As they get older, they'll likely earn more money and they might come back and spend it. On top of that, Julian says buy now pay later helps retailers with the problem they call car abandonment. Which will be familiar to almost anyone who's shopped online. Most consumers will put items in their virtual shopping cart and then when it comes time to check out, they'll be like, I don't need to spend $200. And so what buy now pay later does it actually reduces car abandonment because it makes large purchases seem smaller to the consumer. Remember Amelia and her monopoly money? The lower price tag can lead people to buy more than they will have otherwise. Now, buy now pay later has been growing in the US since at least 2015. But it reached critical mass at the perfect moment just as the pandemic set in. All of a sudden, online retail exploded. And Terry says so did the number of buy now pay later services. It was after paying a firm in Clarna and Sezel and Zip. Like, how many of these things are there? Yeah. And you were also hearing about the partnerships that they were beginning to form with large merchants like Amazon, for example, and Target. And it was kind of like, okay, wait a minute. What is happening? And they're popping up absolutely everywhere. Buy now pay later was no longer this niche thing. Mostly targeting young people allergic to credit by partnering with trendy brands. It was the new form of payment for all kinds of purchases. One thing that I found is that there's a buy now pay later for just about anything, from small business, to medium size business financing, to auto repair, to helping you remodel your home and for easy payments, to even healthcare. Yeah. This might be TMI, I had to get my wisdom teeth taken out. And my dentist can take my wisdom teeth out using buy now pay later. Wow. And that was wild. That's where ice is like, this is a little much. And talk about deep throat. There you go. We've looped back around. So when our investigators take a step back, here is what they see. Buy now pay later is finding its way into more and more corners of the economy. It can be a pretty good deal for customers, and it looks pretty good for businesses. But you know who is not totally thrilled, besides Emilia, of course. Credit card companies, and some of the big banks behind them. What they've been doing to fight back after the break. Loans are basically the oldest financial technology in the book. But since the 1960s, when you think about how people pay with credit for everyday things, usually think about credit cards. So you can imagine how threatening this explosion of buy now pay later was to stodge old banks and credit card companies. There was one report that showed that banks lost between $8 and $10 billion in revenue to buy now pay later offerings. Wow. Because as buy now pay later grew more popular, a lot of people started using it instead of credit cards, which means a lot less transaction fees and interest payments for the credit card companies and the banks behind them. In those banks, they obviously weren't going to stand for it. Financial institutions don't generally just sit back and let things happen to them. And so the banks and credit card companies are trying to fend off this horde of new competitors. At least one bank, Capital One, is refusing to let their credit cards be used for most buy now pay later purchases. But for the most part, banks and credit card companies are getting in on the action. They're acquiring buy now pay later companies outright or rolling out their own services that look a lot like buy now pay later. And this is why it is now possible to buy your plane ticket to go get your wisdom teeth removed. While wearing your new yeezies. And pay for it all later. And the way the system is currently set up, a lot of that spending does not get reported to the credit bureaus. Which brings us to the part of buy now pay later that got Amelia into trouble. Every time she chose to pay later, she was taking out a little loan for the sneakers or the sundress or whatever. But the company giving her that little loan had no idea how many other little loans she had already taken out from other buy now pay later companies. And this is where people like Terry and Juliane see the greatest potential danger. One of the things that really set off the alarms was the opportunity for overextension from the consumer. Because when compared to a traditional credit card or even personal loan, they will check if you have good or no credit or if you have outstanding loans. Buy now pay later firms had no idea how many buy now pay later products a consumer was using. So the opportunity to stack was fairly easy. The same thing happened with credit cards when they first came on the scene in the 1960s. This new kind of credit became available to more and more people. And it was so different from what was possible before. So unregulated that a lot of people got in over their heads, spent more than they could afford. People like Amelia. No one you're just in a state of panic. Like you just just have so many things on your mind. I was pacing. I was sweating. I was crying. So I was like, that's it. I have to call my dad. She'd maxed out her credit card and almost emptied her checking account after around a month of buying now and paying later. She did manage to get her dad on the phone. Did he play the dad card? Was he like, I'm not mad? I'm just disappointed. Oh no, no, he was mad. He was like, I'm mad. This is, she got a whole lecture. He was like, Amelia, that's very dangerous. Instrument payments are extremely dangerous. Like this affects your futures. You're not paying $10. You're paying $40. He did not bill her out. Amelia had to pay off all that spending by herself. And how did the conversation end? Like, what did you, what did you agree on? Just to stop using it. Pay off what I had to pay off and don't continue using it. Like, if you really want something that's expensive, you're going to have to take that money out of your savings and pay for it like then and there. That's a way for your next paycheck. Like, I think I was like, what, 20 at the time? And in 19 or 20, he was like, you don't, you shouldn't be able to afford all this right now. And you simply, you clearly can't. So pay off what you have to do and don't put anything else on it. And how long did it take before you thought now and paid later again? Like two weeks. I didn't learn. That was 2022. And for a while after Amelia says, she kept using buy now pay later a lot. I think out to the point where I just kept getting texts, like 2299s being pulled out from this debit. 2299 here, 2299 there, adding all the way up to $900. These charges were piling up. I was using different platforms. I was using clarinet after pay and probably a firm like all at once. It feels like you're just being buried alive. After another year and a half of buying, Amelia woke up one morning and realized she had more texts from these companies than from her friends. The later in buy now pay later had finally arrived. That's when I was like, okay, if I can't manage it, then like I need to just like cut this out because like I can't have nice things clearly. Like I'm not capable. So two years ago, Amelia decided to go cold turkey. No more buy now pay later. She says she hasn't used it since. And she's paid off all of her buy now pay later debt. But every time she's buying online, she sees those colorful buttons tempting her. And they're in more places every day. Like this one time when she was getting her lips done. The tech asked if she wanted to use something called cherry to pay. That's a lender that finances lip fillers and plastic surgeries for up to $50,000. Amelia said no thanks. That's the scariest thing to me now is just like, if I didn't learn my lesson, oh my gosh, literally my lips would be on an installment payment. There's just no place I think where you cannot see buy now pay later right now. That's Terry Bradford with the Kansas City Fed again. The woodward of our financial woodward in Bernstein from earlier. She's kept up with these kinds of services over the past few years. And she says that is the big change. A few years ago, tons of buy now pay later companies were trying to be everywhere. Now they are everywhere. Today, people use buy now pay later for all kinds of things and not just luxuries. When we first had this conversation, it was more about the nice to have. And now you're saying buy now pay later for things that you need, gasoline, groceries. Terry says we also know more about who exactly is using these services. The Fed's research has found that black and Hispanic women are about twice as likely to use buy now pay later than any other demographic group. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that buy now pay later users also tend to have balances on things like student loans and car loans and personal loans. Also, almost half of buy now pay later borrowers paid late last year, which could spell trouble because there are plans to factor buy now pay later into your credit score starting sometime this fall, which could land heavily on Gen Z consumers, because the people most likely to use buy now pay later are younger. And Gen Z credit scores have been falling over the past year. The demographic that's heavily using buy now pay later is a younger demographic. And without maybe some education about how using buy now pay later can spiral on you, it could become a problem and it could become a lingering problem. Now, Terry says buy now pay later can still be a good deal if you're a prudent shopper, for example, and you need to buy groceries, but you don't have access to credit or cash. Because there's no interest on these loans, they're generally better than something like a pay day loan. But not if you're going on a shopping spree, which brings us one last time to our Gen Z shopper, Emilia. After cutting out buy now pay later, Emilia also cut out credit cards, but she couldn't quite give up the influencer life. In fact, she now works for a company that helps influencers partner with brands, and she dabbles in some influencing herself. Okay, guys, I'm getting ready to go to a pool party. Which helps scratch that bikini buying itch. So I'm going to give you guys a mini haul, and have you guys pick which one we like the best. This time without all the debt. B&O style top, which I really like, and it has little ruffles on it, which is so cute and then. If you're looking for a guilt-free way to spend money, may we recommend a planet money plus? Each monthly subscription means a steady source of funding we count on, and we can use to plan our reporting. It really helps, and we'd love for more of our funding to come directly from all of you. Thanks, as always, to existing supporters who get bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening, sign up at plus.npr.org/planetmoney, or click the link in the show notes. This episode was originally produced by Emma Peasley, engineered by Josh Newell and edited by Molly Messick. Our update was reported by Video Emanuel, produced by Willa Rubin, and edited by our executive producer, Alex Goldmark. Special thanks to Taylor Washington. She is no longer a producer with us. She's currently in nursing school about to graduate. So, if there are any hospitals out there looking for a smart, caring, trans-spotting, healthcare professional, you know where to look. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi, and as she said, three years ago. I'm Taylor Washington. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.