Solving Problems
I imagine there was a time when a credit card was a great thing.
Back when you had to carry around gobs of cash just to make sure you had enough to cover any expenses you might incur, it would have been nice to suddenly have a thin piece of plastic that would serve the purpose just as well. This predates me, so I can only guess at the frustration felt by millions of people as they tried to find an ATM in some obscure location in the middle of the night because they needed money.
The credit card solved our problem.
Then the shift came. This often happens when a company grows too big for its britches. Credit cards became big business, and now we have runaway interest rates that are gouging people. In an effort to grow, credit card companies started hyper-aggressively marketing cards to college students, knowing (or at least indifferent to the possibility) that many of them would have trouble paying them off each month. In an effort to raise profits, they actually bet on encouraging young people to go into debt.
Good business is about solving customer's problems, not your company's problems. The reason we hate credit cards and the companies behind them is that they've long since stopped doing the former and have done the latter for so long that we no longer trust them.
Back when you had to carry around gobs of cash just to make sure you had enough to cover any expenses you might incur, it would have been nice to suddenly have a thin piece of plastic that would serve the purpose just as well. This predates me, so I can only guess at the frustration felt by millions of people as they tried to find an ATM in some obscure location in the middle of the night because they needed money.
The credit card solved our problem.
Then the shift came. This often happens when a company grows too big for its britches. Credit cards became big business, and now we have runaway interest rates that are gouging people. In an effort to grow, credit card companies started hyper-aggressively marketing cards to college students, knowing (or at least indifferent to the possibility) that many of them would have trouble paying them off each month. In an effort to raise profits, they actually bet on encouraging young people to go into debt.
Good business is about solving customer's problems, not your company's problems. The reason we hate credit cards and the companies behind them is that they've long since stopped doing the former and have done the latter for so long that we no longer trust them.