The awful American consumer

We want cheap stuff fast and don’t care who it hurts. Being a consumer is fun in the sense that you get to buy things and have experiences. It’s less fun if you spend time thinking about what’s happening behind the scenes. You don’t just click to make a purchase on Amazon and poof! a package winds up outside your door — there are (often stretched) warehouse workers and delivery people who [ultimately make that happen](. Similarly, your credit card rewards can be nice to use for trips and hotels. They’re also not magic gifts from the sky because you’re special — merchants and other (often poorer) customers[pay for them](. We’re not all accustomed to considering the trade-offs we make to make our consumer-centric economy run like it does. And when we do have to think about it, many of us get uncomfortable, even angry. We want cheap stuff fast, and often don’t think about — and sometimes don’t care about — who it hurts. For my column [The Big Squeeze](, I write a lot about how we’re in a crunch in our capitalist economy in ways big and small. In the latest installment, I took a look at a different phenomenon: the way we as consumers make things worse for workers, the environment, and for each other. Have we become a nation of entitled consumerist terrors? —[Emily Stewart]( senior correspondent for The Goods   Customers are told they’re always right. Naturally, they’ve come to believe it. [photo of multiple screens with images of Fed chair Jerome Powell.]( Getty Images/iStockPhoto Some of the angriest emails I’ve ever gotten from readers were over a story about credit card points. The long and short of it is that the fancier the credit card rewards, the higher the swipe fees for merchants. Those merchants often pass along the costs of those swipe fees to all customers, whatever the payment mechanism. People who pay with rewards cards tend to be more well-off, financially, and their hotel points or flight miles are being, in part, subsidized by people paying in cash or debit who tend to be poorer. A 2010 paper found that households that use cash pay about $149 on average to households that use credit cards, and each of the credit card households gets $1,133 from cash users every year. Essentially, credit card rewards have to come from somewhere, and they’re partly coming from people who aren’t reaping the benefits. Some readers were very angry to discover this information. “Maybe it’s time for people who don’t want to work to know how it feels to foot the bill for other people?” one person wrote to me, apparently equating having a rewards card with having a job. “If people want a better life I suggest education and getting a degree or a certificate in a trade,” wrote another person. “Boohoohoo. Who cares?” wrote another. Some people seemed to feel that they had a serious right to accumulate credit card rewards, regardless of who or what those rewards were coming from. It’s a sentiment that bears out in the data: A 2019 LendingTree survey found that people were likelier to support a rate cap on credit cards if it reduced access for people with imperfect credit than they were if it meant it would significantly lower their rewards. “What that essentially says is that more people [were] okay with fewer folks having access to credit than they were with having their own credit card rewards shrink,” explained Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, in an email. That consumers can be selfish isn’t a new phenomenon. Remember when everyone was hoarding toilet paper and masks at the start of the pandemic? But it is worth pausing and reflecting on how angry people feel when confronted with the idea. [Read the full story »]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   The Noom paradox Noom is a diet app in an anti-diet moment. [Read the full story »](   Procrasti-shopping with NPR’s youngest podcast host How Emma Eun-joo Choi balances being a junior in college with hosting her new spinoff of Wait, Wait ... Don’t Tell Me! [Read the full story »](   More good stuff to read today - [Mexico City and the pitfalls of becoming a remote work destination]( - [Nobody wants more crappy videos on Instagram. Too bad.]( - [America's inflation problem is weirdly hard to fix]( - [The best $0 I ever spent: Watching someone else shop]( - [Car dealers are charging buyers more because that's capitalism, baby]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=goods). If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2022. All rights reserved.