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Layaway is Back, Baby!

Buy now. Pay later. Damn the consequences.

Angus Peterson
6 min readAug 5, 2021

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Female store clerk giving male customer his layaway ticket.
Image courtesy of creditfast.com

Layaway is a relic from long, long ago; when credit cards were rare and people bought things with (gasp!) actual cash.

Oh, the humanity!

You can be forgiven if you thought layaway had met its demise in this digital age, but alas, it is making a comeback.

Bigly.

What Exactly Is Layaway?

Readers of a certain age are likely familiar with layaway. It was definitely a staple of my childhood, especially in the months leading up to Christmas.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let me lay down some knowledge the 1980’s.

Layaway is simply paying for something with cash installments. You would go to the store and pick out the item you want, just like a regular purchase. Only this time, you would head to the back of the store and hand the item over to an employee.

It sounds a little backwards, right?

The store employees would wrap whatever it was you were buying in a huge plastic bag, tag it, then put it in a cart where it got whisked away into the Raiders of the Lost Ark inventory in the backroom.

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Angus Peterson
Angus Peterson

Written by Angus Peterson

Becoming collapse aware in the age of the permanent polycrisis. Follow to get all the new stories: https://anguspeterson.medium.com/subscribe

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