used and they were always imposing on her to help them train a new manager for some other store. She kept her bad debt low and her numbers continued to grow; her employee reviews show that her hard work was paying off in a robust bonus every quarter.
She was the dutiful employee in those first years she worked for Check ’n Go. She left flyers for the store at all the local Laundromats and car repair shops and though she hated doing it, she also tried dropping them off at medical offices around town as well. “Doctors were real touchy about brochures,” she said, but at least a few succumbed. “You’d get a new kid on the block,” Browning said. “His receivables are up; he wants his money for treating John Doe’s son”—and soon that doctor’s office starts sending patients and their families to her store. “If somebody couldn’t pay the deductible or the co-pay or whatever, the clerk says, ‘Here’s a brochure, these people might be willing to help you out.’”
More payday outlets opened up in Mansfield. Where there had been five stores in town in 1999, there would be twelve by 2001. The battle was no longer a race to see who could secure a prime location but a war of dueling rewards programs and rival marketing campaigns. By 2000, she was no longer clearing $250,000 in fees per year, but revenue was in the $210,000 to $220,000 range through 2003, and it edged back up to $235,000 in 2004, by which time there were twenty payday loan stores in town. Maybe that was the truly shocking thing about payday and also the tragedy: Rivals could keep opening new stores but revenues at the existing establishments would remain fairly steady.
Ultimately, this modest-sized working class enclave would become home to twenty-seven shops offering payday advances. It fell on people like Browning to keep people coming in the door. And as the pressures increased to collect more revenues from loyal clients and as corporate hounded her and the other managers to find new customers to replace the old ones whom they would invariably lose, so did Browning’s cynicism about the service she was supposedly offering. It didn’t help that whereas once hers had been the only store in her stretch of Mansfield, by 2006 three competitors had opened outlets only steps from her own.
There was something claustrophobic about those hours I spent in a home overstuffed with Beanie Babies and other collectables. There were so many lighthouses scattered about Browning’s home— lighthouses of wood, lighthouses carved out of stone, lighthouse clocks, lighthouse paintings, a lighthouse thermometer—that I couldn’t imagine a safer place to navigate a ship at night. The breakfast nook where we sat was piled high with bills, magazines, and other daily detritus; a shelf stuffed with assorted dolls loomed. But the good news was that this same tendency to save spilled over to her job. She had detailed records showing how her store performed month by month for her entire tenure at Check ’n Go, including a running tally of the proportion of her loans falling into default each month and the number of customers she was serving. She kept copies of her employee reviews and copies of emails and other missives from corporate. I might have suspected hyperbole if she didn’t have a copy of the actual Check ’n Go directive informing store managers that they were to loan “to anyone getting social security who had at least one dime to their name.”
Check ’n Go printed cards offering regulars a $20 discount for every new customer they brought in. The other big chains did the same. “Now, remember,” Browning said in a deep voice, in imitation of one of her manager’s, “give two referral cards every time you make a loan.” She reverted to her own voice: “The idea was that we could get you to convince your mother, your cousin, your next-door neighbor, your best friend to come to our place.” To extend their reach, the home office instructed that they leave brochures in factory break rooms and in the mailrooms of apartment complexes around town. The company had brochures printed in Spanish. “Grow your fan base by using the Hispanic marketing materials,” read one missive from corporate. Another encouraged store managers to treat even phone calls from people asking for an address or the store’s hours as an opportunity to sell. “Don’t simply answer these questions,” a memo advised. “Find a way to make them your customer!”
But of course new customers wouldn’t do the company much good unless they were converted into semi- regulars. So Check ’n Go programmed its computers to spit out lists of customers who had gone sixty days without taking out a new loan. “We got one of those reports every single morning,” Browning said. “We were supposed to call every person on that list and then also send them a letter. And that person kept showing up on your reports until they came back in.” Management taught her little tricks. “You were supposed to say, ‘I notice you haven’t been here in two months; why don’t you stop by later, we’ll update your information. I’m sure you can use some extra money right now.’” And to keep Browning and her cohorts motivated, corporate offered both a carrot and a stick. Store managers would receive an extra bonus if enough of their sixty-day borrowers returned each quarter—or would get grief if their “customer reactivation rate” was too low. Mainly Browning got grief.
“As far as I was personally concerned, we were being told to harass these people until they walked back in the door,” she said.
Another order that she found even more noxious was the practice of up-selling a loan. Check ’n Go, like most payday lenders, allows people to borrow up to one week’s salary. Up-selling was aimed at a customer who earned enough to borrow $500 at a time but borrowed less than that. “I was to repeat, no less than three times, ‘Now, are you sure you don’t want to borrow $500 before I print this contract?’” Browning said. While she was printing the contract, she might say, “You know I can void this out; are you sure you don’t want that extra money?” Reviewing the contract offered one more opportunity to make her pitch. On the final page of the agreement it laid it out in black and white: We have offered you $500 but you are taking a lesser amount. And Browning would say, “Now you see, you qualify for $500; are you sure this $200 is going to be enough money?”
Collections was its own torture. “If a customer was late paying us back, we were to contact that customer a minimum of three times a day,” Browning said. People give three references when taking out a loan and she was instructed to phone them as well. If they were still late in paying off the loan, she was to phone their place of work. “It was no holds barred,” she said. “You were supposed to do whatever you need to do to get the company’s money back.”
At least the home office didn’t force her to make what some of her rivals referred to as “field calls”—visiting people at home. “If they weren’t there,” Browning said, “they’d have to put on a door hanger that says, ‘You owe us $575, you need to contact our office immediately,’ or whatever, and then it’s there for everybody who comes to the door to see. I had customers tell me they even had people knock on their next-door neighbor’s door to ask what time they’d be home. The idea was to embarrass them into paying any way they could.”
Through her large plate-glass window, Browning could see the Advance America outpost that had opened directly across the street in 2006. Cashland had leased a storefront a few doors down from her own in 2003 and a fourth store called Quik Cash opened in 2005. And so Browning would amuse herself during idle moments watching people play a kind of human pinball between shops.
Her store could boast the biggest parking lot so generally people made her shop their first stop. “They’d borrow money from me and walk straight from my door across the street to the Advance America,” she said. “I don’t know what they did in there, whether they were paying back or borrowing more, but then I’d watch them walk to the next store and then finish up by walking across the street to Cashland. Then they’d walk back up to my place to get their car.” The whole sequence usually played itself out in forty-five minutes or less.
Browning would see the occasional new face inside her store, but she spent most of each day loaning money to the same core of customers. Browning is a talker and inevitably many of these people became friends. They would bring her leftover slices of birthday cake; they would surprise her with cupcakes they had baked. One couple popped in one day for no other reason than to drop off a few apples from the bushel they had bought at a roadside stand out on the highway. Is it any wonder, Browning asked, that with time she saw her job as less about earning quarterly bonuses and more about getting a good night’s sleep so she could survive another day?
“The whole thing came to be about money and greed,” she said.
Maybe a bartender has the same feeling when the glum-faced man who every once in a while used to sneak in for a mid-afternoon snort starts showing up at 11 A.M. for his first nip and eventually is stopping by every day before work. After a time Browning took to applying a kind of shock therapy to her regulars. She would lecture them about the high cost of a payday loan. Stop buying that six-pack of beer, she would order them. Stop going out to eat. And then to punctuate her point she would swivel her computer monitor around. On the screen there was a tally of all the fees they had paid the company over the years.
Browning tried the gambit on a woman named Susan and it worked exactly as she had hoped it would. Susan, an administrator at the local hospital, had been borrowing the same $500 every two or three weeks for almost two years. That $500 was costing around $1,500 a year in fees. “I thought I was going to have to pick her up off the floor,” Browning said. Worse, the woman was borrowing money from other stores. At Browning’s suggestion she borrowed $450 instead of the usual $500, and tried to borrow $50 less each successive time. The last time
