“How did we get here?

— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years

In the summer of 2019, I photographed the new cash advance businesses that had appeared along the main drag of the semi-rural area where I grew up in East Tennessee. Suddenly, there were more than 10 of these businesses on a stretch of highway less than a mile long, and a couple of new bail bond storefronts too. They are impossible to miss, gleaming with generic promise and surrounded by cracked parking lots and kudzu.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reports that a typical two-week payday loan with a $15 per $100 fee equates to an annual percentage rate (APR) of almost 400 percent. More than half of these loans become long term debt burdens even though the majority are taken out for everyday life expenses such as rent, transportation, or groceries.