I have a feeling that the no-credit-check system that Amazon has in place for certain items is the best usary implementation to date. You don’t (seemingly?) need to have any credit, you can get something on payments over 5 months. I find that I am much more willing to buy something I only sort of need if I can do this. Mind you, it does not apply to all of their items. In fact, the boots I wanted in brown didn’t have it, but in black they did. Black it is.

The concept of usary is certainly not a new one, basically anyone who has purchased a house in the last 100 years would know exactly what it is. Paying for an item you can’t (or don’t want to) afford up front with payments over time. In the case of this Amazon system, however, they don’t seem to charge any interest or anything. You just get the item at the same price you would pay cash, but over a 5 month period instead. Fantastic.

This is not unlike those old furniture store ads that always said “90 days same as cash”, though I assume that those were some type of scam or something. Just selling the item is never enough for them, always have to get something on the backend. Maybe in the form of a finance charge or a usary fee or something. Who knows. Amazon is killing it in this aspect (and, I guess, most others, except AWS. Fuck AWS.)