I am not a financial advisor. The statements made on this podcast represent my thoughts and opinions and should not be used to supplement financial advice that would otherwise come from a paid financial advisor.
At around the 10 minute mark, feel free to skip to 37 minutes if you wanna cut some excess financial history lessons and stick to the point about Klarna (I have a tendency to ramble, sorry.)
TL;DR (or DL), Klarna is bad but it serves a need. More importantly, it's a harbinger of the financial crisis people are currently facing and an even bigger one on the horizon. For anyone who is a Xennial, older Millennial, Gen X'r or Boomer, you might remember the word "layaway." Yup, this is the same thing and that's totally bad and listen to the pod to find out why! Yay!

Klarna is the harbinger of doom

The CEO of Klarna went on to publicly defend his decision to partner with DoorDash, Uber, and Uber Eats using the "buy now, pay later", 4 installment payment system. Not only is this bad, unethical, and financially irresponsible... it's also a sign that we're living in some very hard times. And it's an indicator that the health of the economy is in bad shape. Please boycott Klarna.

Klarna Follow Up

I recently saw some shared/liked content by certain individuals in the UX community on my feed. While I try to abstain from direct politics on my page, I remove people whose values clearly don't align with mine. I just happened to see what the algorithm decided to show me and I took action, but only after seeing that they were in the UX space and had dozens of shared/mutual connections with me. I advise people comb through their own lists of contacts and remove anyone who is blatantly suspect with this stuff because you never know. And personally, I don't want to be connected with anyone who shared obscene content or misinformation. I didn't judge any of those mutual connections because it's kind of easy to suspect how we all connected with this person, which is why people need to get more active in finding and removing these people.

PSA: LinkedIn Users - Check your contacts!

Julie Mershon

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