Klarna, says afterwards: how to buy now pay later ” has built a new consumption culture

However, mortgaging all of its lifestyle via an application, or what some people call glafully “klarnamaxing” is increasingly common among social media users seeking to cosplay in the glamor they see online. And they transformed their debt into Braggadocio. In a viral video this year, five friends have grove on how the person with Klarna’s highest balance should recover their dinner bill. Tiktkers transmit “hacks afterpay” and moved through “Hauls afterpay”. The screenshot of a subtitles in cascade user subtitles “slow downnnnnnnnnnn @Klarna” has obtained 62,000 likes on X. It is as if the eastern ease of these services has transformed the whole concept of lasting money into something funny, even stuffed.

The BNPL services themselves are cleverly light about this. “Why pay the old way?” Himplely Klarna’s slogan in a cute pastel. “Eat the whole bathtub of ice cream and spread the calories over six weeks,” said Afterpay in a television ad.

Although “traditional consumer psychology is $ 365 per year feels more than $ 1 per day,” said Dionysius Ang, a professor of the University of Leeds who studies marketing and purchase, these services also go beyond the “temporal crop”. On the one hand, they present themselves as “anti -credit cards” – more kind, softer and more honest. “It is sold as the more intelligent form of credit: no hidden costs,” says Ang. “Consumers might think that it is the most transparent way to pay, especially those who tend to avoid credit cards because they associate it with debt.” On the other hand, the BNPL also plays hard in the “current bias”, the human trend documented to see today’s decisions as more important than the repercussions of tomorrow.

Ang and his co-researcher, Stijn Maesen of the Imperial Business School, observed the expenditure models of 275,000 consumers at a large American online retailer and published a study last year reporting that people were 9% more likely to make purchases if they chose a BNPL option. In addition, consumers who have opted for BNPL have ended up spending more money, leaving the website with purchases totaling 10% more, on average – perhaps the online analog of the impulsive take -up of candy bar at the Cashier counter – as well as returning more frequently to make other purchases.

Indulgence is the name of the game, for lenders and buyers. The ascent of the “financial demonstration” of the rise of BNPL is the Tiktokian ascent of the “financial demonstration” – an idea, resulting from the book of Rhonda Byrne, “The Secret”, that living beyond its means can cause real future success. (That “the secret” has been demystified because pseudoscience did not influence a young audience sent.) It is a kind of magic thought that also animates the “mathematics of girls” and the culture DUPE, two online trends promoting luxury consumption as personal care. A decade ago, only the richest of the rich knew the words “Loro Piana”; Now, anyone with internet access can discover that the designer’s cashmere pants are a high-level status symbol, then uses services like Klarna to make these symbols for themselves.