Faith Smith was already stretching her $500 monthly grocery budget as far as it could go. Then her phone lit up with an imperfect solution.
She got a notification that Target Corp. would allow her to use “buy now, pay later” apps, which let consumers pay for goods in chunks over the course of several weeks or months. Smith was all too familiar with the BNPL process: The 34-year-old administrative assistant was already using it to buy clothes and school supplies for her young daughter. “I can’t just buy groceries out of pocket like I used to,” says Smith, who maxes out her credit on BNPL providers such as Afterpay, Klarna and PayPal. “It helps for a week or two, but then you’re stuck with a grocery bill for a couple months.”
US consumers are increasingly using such installment loans to pay for everyday items like groceries, highlighting the financial pain wrought by the worst inflation outbreak in four decades. Grocery prices jumped 8.4% in the year through March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Almost half of Americans have used BNPL apps, and of those, about 1 in 5 rely on such apps to buy groceries, according to a recent survey from LendingTree Inc. Some 27% of users use the loans as a bridge to their next paycheck.
