The debt of the devil

Store cards: shoppers are seduced by promises of discounts, offers and vouchers

(pictures by Ellen Kelly)

Your store card is like the super short, super shiny, hot pink dress in the window of your all time favourite shop that you just can’t quite bring yourself to walk past. The one that is finished so intricately, fits so snugly, and hangs so delightfully over every curve of the size 6 mannequin. The one that teases you inside the store, filling your mind’s eye with images of a fabulous you, turning the heads of everybody in the middle of Concert Square of a Saturday evening. The one that tempts you to the till with promises of making your life ten times better; of becoming your new best friend.

It’s an investment, you tell yourself. I’ll wear it over and over again, so really, it’s saving me money in the long run. And that colour will go perfectly with so many things I’ve already got.

We’ve all been there. Standing at the till, innocently poised to hand over our hard earned cash in exchange for the dress/shoes/bag of our dreams, when it comes like a bolt from the blue: “Are you interested in saving 10 % on your purchase today?” The sales assistant is smiling with a friendly face and well, really, when you put it like that…of course we’re interested.

It all seems so simple – fill in a few details, skim the small print and sign on the dotted line. We get our ten per cent discount and the nice girl at the till gets her commission for bringing the shop closer to its store card target: hey, everybody’s laughing. Sometimes, if we’re really lucky, there’ll be a gift voucher thrown in too, so it’s not like we’re in a position to grumble. We’ll pay off the tiny amount that we’ve spent today as soon as the first repayment letter drops onto the mat, and cut the card up into tiny pieces. We promise.

Except that we don’t cut up the card. We hang on to it, keep it in our purses “just in case”, in case, one day, there’s something that we absolutely have to have, couldn’t possibly live without, will definitely improve our quality of life, and we just can’t afford to pay for it right now. And soon these little emergencies that we promised ourselves would only be once in a blue moon are happening all too frequently, and somehow we’re at the end of our spending limit, with a massive rack of debt to boot.

Like in the case of the dress, that perfect pink number that we convinced ourselves was such an investment. Suddenly there appear the equally perfect shoes that match like an absolute dream, and then there’s the bag, and of course we couldn’t even think about going home without those earrings that would just set the whole outfit off. Now the dress is beginning to look less like a money saving investment, and slightly more like a full blown spending spree.

And it’s only when we’re all dolled up in the thing that we start
to realise that it may have its flaws after all. Maybe the dress
looked better on the model because the model didn’t have
lumps and bumps in all the wrong places. Maybe hot pink isn’t,
in actual fact, our colour, and is that hem really coming down
already? Our vision of fashion perfection is unravelling before our
very eyes, and beginning to look less red carpet, more
Coronation Street cobbles, and all because we grabbed it on
an irrational impulse, forgetting to check it over before we
raced to the till... or to read the small print.

The small print – that old cliché. It is one of those things that becomes part of our everyday dialogue, a concept that is used in every context both literally and figuratively speaking, but yet we find ourselves disregarding as if it were as irrelevant as a pile of junk mail on our doorstep. In the case of the store card, though, it probably isn’t something we should be ignoring. While the dress of our dreams promised a vision of allure and appeal, but in reality gave us a nasty rash and fell apart in the washing machine, the card seduced us with discounts and vouchers, and then stabbed us in the back with interest rates higher than the platforms at Prada’s autumn/winter 2009 shows. Store cards will typically charge you between 25 and 30 per cent interest – massively more than the APR rates of a standard credit card, not to mention those of a competitive one – so, in terms of the dream dress and accessories, what would have cost you £70 is now going to end up closer to the £100 mark. But of course we didn’t think about it like that when the sales assistant was thrusting it upon us and we were busy daydreaming about the buy now, pay later heaven we were about to enter.

Money expert Sharon Taylforth, who works for bankruptcy and debt advice service One Advice, warns that despite the temptation a store card might appear to offer, the long term consequences really just aren’t worth it.

“Despite the initial benefits of a store card, there is so much to consider. The biggest worry is that you will almost certainly end up paying back more than the item originally cost in the first place,” she advises.

And the problems don’t end there. While most store cards place a spending limit of around the £500 mark, the game is addictive, and as the bills pile up, you could well be on your way to serious debt and even bankruptcy as your financial woes spiral out of control.

Shoppers, beware. What sounds like a dream come true is ultimately going to lead to repayments so high that little treats like buying a new dress will soon be a distant memory. These little devils are thrust at us by assistants who might not even be aware of their dangers, and could lead to financial woes and a lifetime of shopping misery. Remember – what looked great on the hanger doesn’t always look so great when you get it home. Try it on, read the label, and most of all, read the small print.

New clothes become hard to resist

(Picture by Ellen Kelly)