DoorDash, the popular gig economy food delivery service, has announced that it will be partnering with Klarna, the financing service, to offer consumers the option to buy delivery and then pay for it later. That’s right, you can now finance a pizza.
Buying now and paying later has long been a feature of American consumer life when it comes to pricey goods like cars or homes, and few Americans could ever afford to pay for those goods entirely in cash. But while it makes for funny memes to imagine being hit up by a debt collector for a Chipotle payment, the truth is that the American economy is increasingly resembling a dystopian film directed by Bong Joon Ho, the famed Korean filmmaker behind the Oscar-winning Parasite and the new Mickey 17.
Those movies showed us the lengths people would go to escape from debt, whether it was turning your family into conmen or signing up for a mission in outer space that guarantees you will live and die repeatedly until the end of your days.
For Americans, debt is now everywhere, even on the holidays. One survey released in November 2024 found that nearly half of Americans were still paying off debt from the previous year’s holiday spending. “Six in 10 people with credit card debt have had it for at least a year. That’s up 10 percentage points from three years ago,” Bankrate analyst Tedd Rossman explained at the time.
It would be easy to blame this all on people’s lack of individual responsibility. Indeed, financial literacy isn’t a strong suit for a lot of Americans. But as debt invades every aspect of our lives, is it really that Americans have just suddenly become much more irresponsible and unable to live within their means?
There’s an old Chinese proverb that says that our ancestors plant the trees so that we can sit in the shade. The seeds of the debt economy have been laid everywhere, from colleges and universities portraying their outrageous tuition and fees as an “investment” Americans should be willing to go deeply into debt for to the ubiquitous credit card commercials they’re greeted with any time you sit down to watch television.
Our society is telling us that living outside your means is no problem, and we’re listening. But over time we may also see a counterculture start to take root. Financial gurus like Dave Ramsey are building a fanbase based on preaching a philosophy of keeping people out of debt. One issue some Democrats and Republicans have found common ground on is capping credit card interest rates (although any such bill faces long odds in Congress). The absurdity of the DoorDash-Klarna venture is self-evident to many Americans.
Americans are increasingly living in a society that not only expects them to go deep into debt but encourages them to be trapped in their own personal debtor’s jail. A prison break still might be possible, but the recent DoorDash-Klarna agreement is a truly dystopian move.