announced that Ohio residents who did business with Household could receive up to $5,200 per family. But agreeing to a settlement meant the Myerses would have to drop out of their lawsuit. They opted out of the negotiated deal so they could continue to press their specific case in court.
In the end, it hardly made a difference what they chose. The confidentiality agreement Myers and Marcia signed with Household means they can’t reveal the size of their cash settlement, but suffice it to say that in retrospect the monetary difference between the two deals was minimal. They received a better payout than the state would have given them but not so much more that it had been worth all their anguish. The bottom line is that it was a mere pittance compared to what Household had cost them. “It wasn’t worth all the fuss, I’ll tell you that much,” Myers said. “I told my lawyers, ‘The only ones making any money on this are you people.’”
One month after settling with the attorneys general, William Aldinger stood before the cameras for one more blockbuster announcement: Household was being acquired by HSBC, the London-based financial giant, for $16.4 billion. Later, long after the financial crisis of 2008 had done so much damage, Floyd Norris, the
Myers was not nearly so fortunate. Even factoring in his wife’s medical costs and the loss of her income for almost a year, Myers figures that he would have saved enough to retire in 2002 or 2003 at the latest if he had not been lured into a deal with Household. Instead, shortly before resolving their legal case, the Myerses filed for bankruptcy. “You know, you hear all these people saying they’re ashamed to have filed bankruptcy,” Myers said. “That’s not me. They screwed me, and the way I figure it, one screw job is good for another screw job.”
Myers was still working when I visited him at the end of 2008, a week shy of his seventy-fourth birthday. He was too old to be delivering boxes to restaurants so his boss put him to work in the warehouse, packing boxes of tomatoes and the like. His workweek starts on Saturday night at midnight. He works until 8 or 9 A.M. on Sunday morning and then returns to the plant Sunday night to work the same hours. He picks up a third shift during the week. “Ain’t too bad,” he said with an amiable smile.
Harder to swallow has been their slide down the housing hierarchy. The trailer park in the south suburbs, the one with trees and a swimming pool, raised its rates to $400 a month, which proved too steep a price for a part- time produce boxer and a cafeteria worker. That meant the Myerses had to move—again. They looked for a place that cost $200 a month or less, which is how they ended up at Pine View.
Marcia misses her old flower beds. The small patch of dirt available to her now is nothing like the garden she had in those few years they owned a home. But she tells herself she had lived in trailers before and they would do just fine in one now.
It helped that they had recently visited the old place. The couple was shocked by what they saw. They had read about foreclosures in the paper but it was nothing like seeing it up close. The old place was still white with the teal trim but it was as if the house had been physically moved out of the stable working-class neighborhood that they knew and dropped into a deteriorating ghetto. There were vacant houses everywhere, with plywood over windows and garbage strewn about. Several payday lenders had opened storefronts in the area, as had a check casher and a rent-to-own place. “We didn’t feel so bad after that visit,” Myers said.
Yet he can’t help but feel lousy sometimes, he said. It’s not the lost house, or the fact that he’s still working hard into his mid-seventies. It’s the feeling that he let Marcia down and also himself.
“After I first found out about the shafting I took, I felt dumb,” he said. “I felt really, really dumb for a good long while there.” He confessed as much to one of his attorneys. “He says back to me, ‘Hey, there are people with a lot more mental capabilities than you that got took. We got police chiefs in these lawsuits, we got schoolteachers.’ He listed off a bunch of people with better educations than me.
“It made me feel better. At least it was everyone who was took.”
The stomping piano chords and tambourine slaps blaring over the loudspeaker are at once familiar. They are the opening notes to the early Motown hit “Money (That’s What I Want).” The nation’s check cashers and payday lenders have a dangerously low sense of irony, I mused. We are a respectable business, their leaders have been saying since the founding of the National Check Cashers Association in the late 1980s. Sure, we cater to a hard-pressed, down-market clientele but we are not the money-grubbers the popular culture makes us out to be. We provide a useful service critical to the working of the U.S. economy. Our products are heavily regulated and fairly priced. Yet here they were kicking off their twentieth annual gathering in October 2008 with a musical production based on a song whose lyrics repeat, more than thirty times, that what the singer wants, more than love and more than happiness, is lots of money.
The convention was being held in Las Vegas. The women dancing across the stage were young and buxom and dressed in skimpy sequined outfits. The men were buff and tan and similarly underdressed. We could have been sitting in any show room on the Strip except that the lyrics had been rewritten for the occasion. Instead of an unconscious self-parody the skit was actually aimed at a handy target in those dark and unsettling days in the fall of 2008: the country’s bankers. If not for the behavior of the banks, their industry would not be nearly so robust. The banks abandoned lower-income neighborhoods starting thirty years ago, creating the vacuum that the country’s check cashers filled. The steep fees the banks charge on a bounced check or overdue credit card bill fuel a lot of the demand for payday advances and other quick cash loans. The big Wall Street banks had stepped in and provided money critical to the expansion plans of many in the room, but never mind: These entrepreneurs selling their financial services to the country’s hard-pressed subprime citizenry are nothing if not opportunistic. The nation’s narrative, they argued, was theirs. The banks, who were booed lustily throughout the two-day conclave, would serve as the poverty industry’s new bogeyman.
“I get my money (when I want), I get my money (when I want),” the troupe sang as they danced and pantomimed various financial transactions. Those playing the part of bankers (picture a tie over an otherwise naked male torso) were emphatically shaking their heads “no” (“At the bank I feel like I’m on trial; I’d rather get fast service and a smile”), but when those in the role of customers knock on the door of their local “financial center,” they are greeted by friendly people who are only too glad to cash their checks or to loan them cash until their next paycheck. Apparently salvation is sweet. Suddenly a dozen or so very good-looking young people were dancing through a blizzard of fake twenty-dollar bills while singing, “I got my money (and it works for me).” The extravaganza brought down the house.
There’s no single gathering place that routinely brings together more of the many strands of the poverty business than this one, held this year in a cavernous hall in the bowels of the Mandalay Bay convention center. Those who pioneered the payday advance industry in the mid-1990s started showing up at meetings of the National Check Cashers Association because they didn’t know where else to go and, over time, other parts of this subculture of low-income finance—the pawnbrokers, Western Union and MoneyGram, the country’s largest collection agencies—followed. Eventually the check cashers hired an outside consulting firm to give them a new name, and since 2000 their organization has been called the Financial Service Centers of America, a rebranding at once more respectable and opaque. When expressed as an acronym, FiSCA, the name sounds quasi-official, like Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, or some other agency playing a mysterious but vital role in the U.S. economy.
Business remained good in the poverty industry, despite hard economic times and also because of them. People struggling to get by, after all, are often good news for those catering to the working poor and others at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Everywhere I looked there were people flying their corporate colors. Competing battalions were dressed in look-alike pants and pullover shirts bearing company logos, each representing another big chain booking hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues each year, if not billions.
Yet despite flush times, the weekend felt like one extended, oversized group therapy session for an industry suffering from esteem deficit disorder. The CEO of one of the industry’s biggest chains, ACE Cash Express, even
