Previously, it was mostly cars, household appliances and other major purchases that were paid for in installments. Today, however, installment payments are increasingly entering everyday life and have also arrived at the supermarket: you can in fact go shopping, fill your cart and postpone payment or divide it into several instalments. It is the new possibility introduced by Pewex, a supermarket chain present in Rome and Lazio, which allows customers to defer payment for shopping through the app and the Klarna financial service.
A possibility presented as flexible and convenient for consumers, but which also opens up a question that is anything but trivial: how far can consumer credit be pushed, if it even concerns food, i.e. one of the most basic needs that exist?
How it works
Shopping in installments is available, as the chain itself explains, in all the brand’s stores. Pewex is a large-scale distribution company present in the capital and its province: the service therefore concerns exclusively the chain’s network and not, at least for now, Italian supermarkets in general.
The system is managed through the Pewex app and Klarna, the company that offers deferred payment and Buy Now Pay Later services. At the time of payment, the customer can choose between different options: pay the entire amount immediately, postpone payment for 30 days without interest, or divide the expense into three monthly installments, also in this case without additional costs.
It is also possible to finance the expense over a longer period, from 6 to 12 monthly installments — but here the music changes, because an interest rate is applied, with conditions that depend on Klarna and are subject to approval. It is precisely this formula that deserves more attention as it transforms food spending, a recurring and necessary purchase, into a small debt with lots of interest to be repaid.
It must also be said that the process is not complicated, but requires preparation before arriving at the checkout: those who want to use the service must have the Pewex app and complete the registration with Klarna, providing various personal and financial data: telephone number, date of birth, billing address, tax code and the card or account details to be used for payment.
Because it causes discussion
Behind the convenience of being able to choose how to pay, Pewex’s novelty opens up a much broader question. If today you can pay in installments even for your weekly shopping, the amount you need to fill the fridge at home, it’s natural to ask yourself: how difficult has it become to make ends meet?
Until recently, deferred payment mainly concerned expensive and non-essential goods, but today it enters the supermarket trolley and concerns what families buy every week, without exceptions: bread, pasta, milk, fruit, vegetables.
The problem is certainly not being able to divide a particularly high expense, nor does choosing this formula automatically mean finding yourself in financial difficulty. It can happen to anyone to have a heavier month than usual. The point is another: what happens when credit becomes the instrument with which even the most ordinary and repetitive expenses are supported?
Because paying in installments for an exceptional purchase costing a few thousand euros is one thing. Starting to pay in installments what you will buy back the following week is a completely different story. If today you spend 150 euros at the supermarket and decide to pay it in three months, you haven’t made a deal: you’ve just moved the bill into the future. In the meantime, however, the spending continues — and the installments risk piling up on top of each other, month after month.
This is the most delicate point. Paying in installments can immediately give you the feeling of having more economic margin. But it doesn’t lower the cost of living by a single cent. And if it becomes a habit, it risks transforming a recurring need – to eat – into an equally recurring financial commitment.
A very disturbing question therefore remains: have we really reached the point where, to buy food, we need to think about how to finance it? The service can be useful in specific situations, sure. But the very fact that Buy Now Pay Later has entered the shopping cart says something about a context in which, for many families, even the most ordinary food expenses are becoming increasingly burdensome to bear.
The CGIL’s comment
The CGIL’s comment is harsh, seeing behind this “new convenience” a signal that is anything but reassuring: the credit that enters into daily spending because income is no longer enough to cover even essential needs with the same ease.
In a post on Facebook, the general secretary Natale Di Cola contests this normalization of installment payments even for small amounts:
They tell us about freedom and convenience for customers but the truth is that the people’s crisis is being exploited to further maximize profits on primary and indispensable goods. This is the measure of the difficulty that people in our country experience.
For the CGIL, the problem must be tackled at the root, intervening on prices and increases, not simply making it more convenient to postpone the payment of expenses:
It’s unacceptable. What else needs to happen before the Government and local institutions face the cost of living? We need to control prices, shine a light on unjustified price increases to combat speculation and, above all, we need a public alternative, because it is incredible that access to food continues to be exclusively in the hands of the market and the opportunistic behavior of large-scale retail trade.
