Browning ever saw her was when she came in to pay back the $150 she owed plus the $22.50 fee.
But far more common were customers like David, a GM pensioner who was as reliable as the morning mail. Each month began the same way, Browning said, with David standing outside her door, two cups of coffee in hand. “If it was the first of the month,” Browning said, “I knew I could count on a McDonald’s coffee.” David, she said, received a monthly pension of around $2,600 plus another $1,800 or so from Social Security—more than $50,000 a year. His house was paid for. But he was an inveterate gambler and always broke. Every month he would borrow the $500 maximum—and then $800 starting in 2005, after the legislature increased the ceiling on a payday loan. It had been costing him $900 a year in fees to borrow $500 a month and then $1,400 a year once he was able to borrow $800.
Browning would plead with him to borrow less. “We really need to get you out of this,” she would tell him. It was too late, though. He owed money to stores all around town. When Browning ran into him at the local Walmart in the fall of 2007, a few months after she was fired, he confessed to her that he was juggling loans at seven stores. She figured that in the ten years and three months she served as a manager with Check ’n Go, David had paid $9,150 in fees on 115 loans. That, of course, didn’t count the tens of thousands of dollars he was paying to other stores. And he was hardly alone. Browning said she did the math. In the final two years she ran her store, six in every ten people she would see in a given week were customers she saw at least once a month.
She fantasized about quitting. The job was affecting her sleep and making her irritable. “No one in my family was happy with me,” Browning said. “I was tense. I was upset. I was depressed. I had fifty thousand different kinds of emotions I did not like.” It seemed so tempting when the managers at rival stores were always quitting. “I know of a few who just got up and walked out the door,” she said. “They’d wait for their supervisor to make a visit and then literally say, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’”
But Browning was pushing sixty and by that time was earning a base salary of around $30,000 a year. Neither she nor her husband had saved enough for either of them to stop working, and no one was dangling jobs that would pay her that much money. The plan was to put in a few more years and retire.
Still, she was hardly acting like an employee eager to stick around. When a manager from the next region over, a guy named Maurice, began a conversation by saying, “Here’s what I need you to do for me, Chris,” she couldn’t help herself. “I said—and this is word for word—‘What I need you to do, Maurice,’ I says, ‘I need you to go downtown in front of the courthouse. I’ll meet you there so I can shove my foot up your ass.’” When I asked her why she would have spoken to a boss like that, she looked at me incredulously. The words practically exploded out of her mouth: “Because he was an idiot!” Only later did she explain to me her real reason for getting angry. Maurice, she said, was phoning to tell her she needed to do a better job recruiting back old customers. “Every morning I’d get a printout listing out all the people who hadn’t been in the store in at least twenty-four months,” she said. “These are ones who managed to get out of the cycle. And I’m supposed to sit there late every night on the phone, bothering them at home? They know where to find me if they need me.”
One day, she spotted three young black men lurking outside her store (roughly 20 percent of Mansfield’s population is African-American). Fearing she was about to be robbed, she hid a couple of thousand dollars in cash in a filing cabinet. It turned out to be a false alarm, but, unfortunately, her immediate supervisor chose that hour or two when she was feeling paranoid to make a surprise visit. Finding that she had socked away around $2,000 in a filing cabinet, she was fired. She is now suing Check ’n Go for wrongful termination.
Jared Davis went off when I mentioned Browning’s name. How good a manager could she really have been if she was lending out money to people owing money to all these other stores? That made a person a greater credit risk—and you weren’t doing that person any favors in the long run. “If we abuse a customer, is that customer coming back?” he asked in a pleading tone. “Come on.” He shook his head as if to ask how anyone could believe such nonsense as Browning put forward.
Davis denied that it was Check ’n Go policy to up-sell customers (“If you’re asking me did it ever happen—I’m not saying there’s not some employees out there who’ve never done something wrong”) but he readily admitted to its practice of contacting those who have not visited one of their stores in sixty days. “Payday lending isn’t like it used to be where you just open a store and make money,” he said. “You have to keep your brand out there in front of people.” With increased competition, he said, “we all do what we can to find an edge.”
The company’s public relations director, Jeff Kursman, sat in our meeting and he piped up. “We work very hard here at being a good corporate citizen,” Kursman said. He pointed his chin at the shiny green press packet in front of me. Inside were a series of slick brochures offering parents advice on protecting their kids (“Halloween Safety Checks for Children,” “Summer Safety Checks for Children”) that Check ’n Go, working in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, distributes at all its stores. The packet also included a copy of
“I think we’re doing right by people,” Davis said. But people like Browning gave the industry a bad name. “It’s irresponsible the way she was acting,” he said. “The part she never learned is that we’re in this for the long haul. If we’re abusing people, do you think they’re coming back?”
Perhaps—but perhaps people just don’t feel like they have any other choice. A few days after my visit, Browning responded to a follow-up email I had sent to her suggesting that I might phone her daughter. “She can speak with you,” Browning wrote, “from a former customer perspective about how they kept chiding her to borrow more money.” In the end, even after Browning’s warnings, her own daughter succumbed. She had fallen so deep into debt, Browning said, that she and her husband needed to bail her out.
Over barbecue in a town that might as well be a suburban Mayberry, Roy Barnes, self- described good ol’ boy, was telling me how close Georgians came to saving the world from itself in 2002. He still thinks about the bill he had signed into law during his final months as Georgia’s governor, convinced that had it been allowed to stand, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and the whole lot of them on Wall Street might not have been so quick to buy whatever junk a subprime mortgage lender was peddling. “I was just trying to put my momma’s rule into law: You have to live with your choices,” Barnes said in a drawl that calls to mind Andy confiding in Aunt Bee. “There had to be accountability. These banks; think about what would have happened if they knew they would have to pay a price for all those loans that were no good.”
Vincent Fort, a black state senator who jokingly describes his politics as “neo-confrontational,” told me more or less the same story in a conference room across the street from the state capitol. “I’ll tell you what, man,” he said in a deep bass voice. “You just had to see the way they came after us to know that we were on to something.” Like the 1999 North Carolina law, the bill that Fort drafted and Barnes refined was aimed at clamping down on predatory subprime loans but went one critical step further. It dictated that any entity taking possession of a “high cost” subprime loan—including a big investment bank on Wall Street that held it only long enough to sell it off in small tranches to municipalities, pension funds, college endowments, and anyone else in the market for a mortgage-backed security—was legally liable for the integrity of that loan. The law defined high cost as a loan carrying more than five percentage points in up-front costs or an interest rate more than eight percentage points higher than the rates on a comparable Treasury bill. Perhaps if they knew they might get sued, the banks might have taken at least a cursory look at a loan’s terms before snapping it up on a secondary market and selling it off in small slices to investors as far away as Reykjavik and Berlin.
Eventually other states, including New York, would follow Georgia’s lead and pass similar laws. And those states would then learn that there was another impediment in their way as they tried to crack down on the most reckless subprime lenders. But in Georgia, in 2002, a half-dozen years before the world would be lamenting America’s subprime mortgage mess, lawmakers had devised if not the perfect prophylactic against financial disaster, then at least the beginnings of a solution. “In Georgia,” Fort says, “of all places.”
“I twisted arms,” Roy Barnes said. “I called in favors. I had legislators out to the mansion every morning. I threatened everyone. It was the hardest bill I ever passed—and I changed the Georgia flag.” And then, when the
