PBS‘ Frontline this week aired an interesting episode on the credit card industry, which began with a discussion of some of the controversial practices initiated by Providian and soon adopted by the bulk of its competitors. I think the episode raises some interesting philosophical questions about the nature and moral force (to borrow Alan Wertheimer’s term) of exploitation.
For instance, one of the practices Providian is said to have developed involved substituting what they called “stealth pricing” for explicit annual fees. Instead of charging all its customers a flat fee of, say, $50 per year, Providian offered cards with zero annual fee but with steep penalties for late payments, going over your credit limit, etc. To many customers, Providian’s cards thus appeared to be free. But Providian knew that many of its customers - especially the low-income, high credit-risk customers it was targeting - would wind up paying much more in penalties than they would have with a flat annual fee, even if most customers (wrongly) believed the opposite to be true.
So, at least at first glance, it looks like Providian was exploiting several kinds of vulnerability on the part of these customers. First, the customers were vulnerable insofar as they were likely to do the things that would incur penalties. And secondly, they were vulnerable insofar as they tended to underestimate the extent to which they would do this, and hence underestimate the true cost of the cards Providian was offering. Providian took advantage of these vulnerabilities to enhance its own profit (which, at its peak according to the documentary, were around $1 billion per year).
Is this a case of wrongful exploitation? It might be, but the story raises a few questions in my mind.
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