Ah, the problem for the poor isn't inflation outstripping wage growth, it is that the poor just don't have enough access to taking on more debt. This is why Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPLs) are such a service to society!! Now, you can buy all the things you can't afford because your salary is too low and your credit cards are already maxed, and not pay until later! Brilliant!
Note the sarcasm.
Now, while I am a huge non-believer in the "good" that these services do, considering that the people in financial distress are most likely BNPL users and, they are twice as likely to be under financial stress than credit card holders (they likely have credit cards too remember), there are some potential positives - namely, changing the way people think about banks.
Now, I don't know if this exists, but I was just thinking about how we in crypto have become our own banks and we can collateralize loans, for example of the like that is coming to Polycub through 
For example, if I am "my own bank" this means that I should be able to use my value as I choose and when I choose, managing it myself. However, "managing" is not that easy. But, if I was for example able to pool my value into a DeFi pool where like normal I am able to earn interest, but I also have on-the-fly access to draw on that pool through a debit card, that would means I could use the card in a store and have the contract manage the payments. This could function like a credit card, but personally, would want debit card access, where I am using either the accrued earnings or portions of the principle.
Using Polycub as an example here, I have put a resources into the various pools and earn a bit each day on them. The fees on Polygon are very low, so transacting often isn't much of an issue. If hypothetically I was earning 100 dollars a day, I would be able to draw upon that 100 through card access, with the transaction costs and a "management fee" (say 2%) taken out, with all of the services between handled through various smart contracts, so that I get my goods and the seller gets their money. This could mean that the seller could also choose to immediately pool the profits and start to earn some interest on their account too, that they can use for their business running costs and inventory payments.
As said, this could also run on credit too, where people are able to collateralize their holdings to borrow against, or set up debt models (much cheaper) like a tradition bank, but the pool of resources are crowdsourced and the interest gets spread back through the staked users, that in turn increases their own earnings that they can use to purchase, pay a management fee on and increase the earnings of the pool again.
While we should be changing the way we consume, like it or not, we do need to buy goods and services to survive. However, we are mostly restricted to making purchase decisions from the enduser position, not the position of the bank. Do we consume differently when we are the bank as well? Most likely, but the first purchase decision to make is to winddown our bank consumption and ramp up our be the bank processes.
This is not an individual movement, it is a movement of individuals, which is why the pooling of the bank becomes such a strong strategic position. One of the reasons that banks have up until this point had such a stranglehold on us all is, they have been able to collect and pool their own resources to put themselves in a near unassailable position to play the middleman role. But now, they are increasingly under attack, as new service models are built to compete and, crypto is going to leverage this cultural shift to give ownership back to the people. It creates a distributed collective, not bound by location or border - two mechanisms that restrict our mobility and keep us economically corralled as financial cattle to be milked.
The entire world of finance is going to be disrupted and what I think a lot of people are not recognizing yet is, it is already highly fragile. We should know this already by the changing depth and frequency of collapse, but without alternative, we just have to grin and bear it, each time having the thumbscrews tightened a little more, to leave us with even less.
There are now alternatives.
And more to come.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
