Your Duty As A Citizen: Go Into As Much Debt As Possible

Doug Champeau, in his Thanksgiving Day article titled “The view from behind the cash register,” tells us that we, the “Minnesota consumer,” have an obligation this Christmas season.

Our obligation? To buy, buy, buy. To purchase as many things as possible to help our flailing economy.

How does Doug propose we do this? By helping him gain a couple seconds recognition at the next employee meeting and earn potential meager bonuses by applying for the Target credit card.

“Few apply; fewer are approved,” Doug kindly informs us. But that shouldn’t deter you from allowing credit bureaus to check your credit, thus instantly lowering it, and then denying you the privilege of that piece of plastic which would potentially grant you a couple thousand dollars more for Christmas shopping this year to spend exclusively at Doug’s fine retail establishment… because when you apply, you get 10% off your purchases for the day!

Perhaps Doug is allowing himself to be so blinded by his employer’s early-morning pep-talks and sales training on how to convince the consumer that applying for this credit card will be good for us that he forgets the reason that so few of us coveted consumers are not approved for his Target credit card: because the majority of us are already so inundated with debt, our credit cards maxed out, from other retail establishments’ and bank’s credit cards that we have no room left, no credit left, to be approved. We’ve claimed bankruptcy and been deemed unworthy for banks to lend to. We’re no longer coveted; we’re now considered irresponsible and told we’re deadbeats for failing to pay our financial obligations. Obligations that Doug gleefully and dutifully tries to encourage us to accept more of.

But we can save 10% if we just apply now! It’s just a quick 2-minute process that just might save Doug from getting reprimanded that day for not meeting his goal for number of applications he’s taken.

Doug also informs us that we should remember that the “near-minimum-wage cashiers” ringing up our impulse purchases (“I only came here for two things,” he says he hears many times throughout a day) are people, too.

I want to ask Doug if his admitted meager hourly wage paid by Target is enough for banks to approve him for a credit card at his own place of employment.

For those who think I’m being a bit harsh, I too was once an under-paid employee at another Minneapolis-based national retail holiday “hot spot.” You know it by it’s blue-shirted employees and big yellow price tag on the outside of the building. I was paid $8.75 an hour not only to sell the cameras in my department, but to push the store’s credit card so that the customer could continue to spend more there and increase their overall amount spent that day and create customer loyalty. Well, of course you create customer loyalty when your credit card only works at one place. But let’s stay focused. Were the majority of those applicants, whose applications were practically forced upon them, approved? Of course not. When I decided to apply, hoping to have access to enough money to buy the camera I tried to sell every day and wanted for myself, approved for this credit card? Of course not. And my meager hourly wage certainly didn’t allow me to buy it without credit.

But when I did convince a customer of mine to apply for the credit card, my managers made sure to pat me on the back and sing my praises… until 5 minutes later when I allowed a customer to leave my department after buying the least-expensive digital camera with no frills or “add-ons,” and without filling out that application. I was sternly reminded of how many applications I needed to reach my goal, or my employer’s goal, for the day, my past accomplishment of mere minutes ago was quickly forgotten.

Were there incentives for this hard work? Depends on your definition of incentives. Are verbal praise and momentary recognition at the morning meeting enough to sedate you into making sure the corporation makes enough money to pay you slightly more than minimum wage to continue to make them billions? (Don’t get me started on health insurance.) There was no commission involved; in fact, we were told to make sure that customers knew that so they could trust us to point them to the right products for “their needs” and not for the purposes of our own paychecks.

Doug tells us about how his bosses are “fixers.” They quickly, and with “lightning-fast voodoo,” correct Doug’s honest ringing error and credit a customers’ credit or debit card and give $3 discount coupons for the inconvenience. All is well, right? The customer experience is positive, errors were corrected promptly, and the customer goes home thinking highly of the attention and good customer service she received. As a former employee of a well-known bank here in Minnesota, I can say that I talked to many of these customers that were erroneously charged for these sorts of things, and the “prompt” corrections that were made didn’t credit the customers’ account for days, often causing overdraft fees that the bank wouldn’t reverse, causing the customer to go back into the retail establishment to try and get them to correct the error… only to be told that she had to go back to her bank to fix it, and a month later she receives a letter in the mail from her bank, who has also provided her with a credit card, informing her that her interest rate has now reached the bank’s default percentage because she failed to make a payment on time because her account was overdrawn due to this simple error and she had to wait until her account was positive to make her payment. A week later she receives a similar letter from a different bank who practices universal default stating her interest rate was increased to an astronomical twenty-nine percent due to information received from a major credit bureau. She had never been late on a payment. Never fear, thanks to the wonderful fact that we are not just bystanders in the credit industry, but encouraged to get involved, in a half dozen months and countless communications between retailer, credit bureau and bank the situation will be resolved, because of course in today’s world she has that kind of time on her hands.

But you should definitely encourage her to go further into debt by offering your store’s credit card. After all, the ten percent she would save is worth it!

Does this seem a bit far-fetched to believe? It’s not. Ask your average consumer how many times he or she have had to go back and forth between bank and retailer to correct errors, with little cooperation and so time-consuming that it had a long-lasting effect on his or her overall financial standing. You may be surprised with the responses.

I read over Doug’s article a few times, wondering if it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, hoping it was. To know that someone would say ”When I put your Chinese-made toy or faux Christmas tree into a plastic bag manufactured in Thailand, know that your dollars are lifting economies globally” with a straight face is frightening, to say the least. Even the image of ringing up our items and bagging them that Doug plants in our collective heads is enough to keep me at home and away from his store: “…Once merchandise is dumped on the conveyor belt, we rapidly scan it and deposit it into thin plastic bags” [which take hundreds of years to biodegrade] “then into the customers’ cart. Our store-labeled bags come preformed, precut and by the millions, designed for rapid deployment off of steel arms…”

Doug can’t be serious, right? He can’t seriously think that he is not only doing something good for the economy, but being treated fairly and respected for his hard work?

So, my fellow Minnesotans, I urge you to spend, consume, and waste. Plastic bag manufacturers in Thailand making cents on the dollar, not to mention our environment, will thank you.