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Tthere's a scary article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend entitled "What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know About You?", which discusses the manipulative and Big Brother-like ways credit-card companies profile and amateur psychologize their patients, er... clients into paying the money they owe. I must admit I was quite horrified, after reading the piece, and immediately forwarded it to a friend who has worked at various banking institutions over the past ten years. But is this article really something we should be worried about, as consumers?
While on some level I do think that credit-card companies need to know about the types of purchases their clients make, in order to understand who these people are and whether they are likely to pay them back, the kinds of things described in this article are particularly underhanded and sneaky. For instance, according to the article's author, Charles Duhigg, a former Canadian Tire exec named J.P. Martin analyzed all the data the company had on their credit-card clients to determine that Sharx Pool Bar here in Montreal is "the 'riskiest' drinking establishment in Canada." What makes it "risky"? The fact that, according to Martin, "47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months."
Okay, stop, hold the phone. Are you telling me that people who shoot pool at Sharx are considered risky investments because they shoot pool at Sharx, or is there something more to it than that?
The article goes on to quote Martin, saying "The person who buys a skull for their car, they are like people who go to a bar named Sharx. [...] Would you give them a loan?" I'm sorry, but I honestly don't see the connection between people who buy skulls for their cars and people who shoot pool at Sharx. If you took a poll of Montrealers, I'm pretty sure that most of us have shot pool at Sharx, at some point in our lives. It's the kind of place where students and young people go to shoot pool downtown, and they are well-known for having tables that are in good condition, so whether you're serious about shooting pool or just want to play a few games with friends from school, this is a good place to go.
It's genuinely not a dive bar where you'll end up in a fight after accidentally making eye contact with a Hell's Angel, or
something. In fact, this place is consistently voted #1 in the Montreal Mirror's Best of Montreal survey. People identify it as being on the up-and-up, and I must say, it's pretty nice as far as pool halls go, having been there, though I prefer Fat's (#4 in this year's survey) just across the street, myself.
All this to say that when I saw that NPR was looking for someone to talk about Sharx on their show, "Planet Money," I contacted them to give my opinion.
In a weird way, I ended up defending the reputation of a local pool
hall, even though I wasn't originally sure what they wanted to know
about Sharx, or that it related to the NYT story. They asked me to
describe the place, and I did. Granted, I've only been there maybe
twice in my life, but I didn't get the impression that it was a place
for shady dealings (at least, not any more so than anyplace else in
Montreal). I now know what the angle was, and this makes it all the
more weird to me. After all, it's not like the piece was suggesting
that Sharx employees have been cloning people's cards and making
unauthorized charges, nor was it even saying that Sharx has a bad
reputation—outside of Martin's generalizations about the people who
frequent the place and happen to own Canadian Tire credit-cards.
Which is exactly why the whole thing is so insidious. To me, the
point of Duhigg's article is that credit-card companies are making
faulty judgements against their clients, based on amateur psychology,
statistics, and the feeling they get from the names of the places their customers shop. Just because you don't like the name Sharx (or the way it's spelled with an X, or even the fact that it's a pool hall rather than an upscale yoga boutique) doesn't mean that it's an unsavoury place, and indeed, there is no proof that it is an unsavoury place. The whole point is that it doesn't matter what the place is like; it only matters that the people who use their credit-cards there are bad people, because this random statistic has said that those
