I don't do online banking or e-shopping. Two reasons why.

1. I don't have a credit card, and I have no intention of getting one.

Good rating, but currently tiny income; don't trust the companies; don't like the way every year the unsubtly-coercive pushing of the consumer-debt narcotic gets ever shriller, more obnoxious, and more ubiquitous. This starts with the decision someone made in the nineties to make online commerce vary from "unusable" to "outright impossible", depending on who-with, for anyone who doesn't have a credit card. Obnoxious TV ads. And now every damn store pitching their own separate brand of credit card at you every time you make a purchase using cash or debit. Why are they pushing this so hard, unless it will somehow make the lending companies (which apparently now includes every Tomco, Dick Inc, and Home Depot) richer? And how will it do that, unless it somehow makes me poorer? Don't give me that "you don't overspend and pay each bill in full as it comes due and you don't get dinged for any interest" bullcrap. They can't be purely counting on the people that will stupidly overspend. Certainly, they can't expect to get more than the customers' take home pay. Or can they? See below.

2. It's unsafe. I'm something of a technophile, and certainly no Luddite, or I wouldn't be here posting to a blog's comment roll. I know the risks and I do not accept them. Too many scams -- from fly-by-night vendors to identity thieves and who knows who. Too many leaks, by the Choicepoints of the world. You swipe your card, it's one transaction. You put your number into a web page somewhere and Christ alone knows how many transactions. Hell, even swiping your card is no longer safe, when unscrupulous companies will keep sending you crap and dinging your account over and over again after only one card swipe. There've already been more than enough gripelogs about that type of scam, as I'm sure all of us know! Or not, since "enough" might be best defined as "so many the scam stopped being tried, at least outside Nigeria".

The legitimate but dubious-looking emails the banks and CC companies purportedly put out only make things worse. My theory is, on purpose.

How does the whole "getting everyone and his brother to sign up for a credit card" thing make them richer, given the gobs more they spend on advertising every year and the unchanging (often dismal) incomes of the advertisees? Simple. The money doesn't ultimately come from the cardholders. Some of it comes from merchants (who often eat the costs of fraudulent transactions), but mostly, I guess, they're scamming their own insurers and reinsurers.

Of course, they can only make vendors eat some transactions and their insurance company pay out if there's lots of fraudulent transactions.

Ah. Now the lights go on.

They still pocket the interest payments, and whatever service charges (probably numerous, dubious, and frequent) they see fit to ding cardholders for. Everyone else loses: customers have spiraling debt and credit-rating problems or even bankruptcy, if not from their own bad financial planning then from identity theft. Vendors eat one in N transactions. Of course they pass the pinch on to their customers (credit-card using and otherwise) in the form of higher prices. Insurance companies get hit with massive claims. Even customers that don't use credit cards get hit, though less hard, in the form of merely raised prices at merchants. At least the effect there is not going to blindside them like a bill for $10,000 for someone else's car repairs and furniture-buying spree.

Oh, yeah. Besides the lenders, there is another winner. Identity thieves. I wonder how much of the $600 for my sofa is the hidden "tax" that pays for all the credit card company Superbowl advertising. Levied when they raised the price after yet another furniture-buying spree by an identity thief produced uncollectable bills they were owed, hiked their insurance, or whatever. Subsidizing, if indirectly, the whole scam.

Identity thieves and lendors -- what an unholy alliance.

What a scam.

Oh, I forgot to mention reason number 3. It's especially topical, too.

3. All the email spam to get people to sign up, often implying they already have an account they should be checking regularly. (Oops, our mistake. But we know you want one. Sign up now!) Plus the additional spam trying to scam you. (Often looks very similar.) As far as I am concerned, the companies are responsible for all of the spam, however much of it genuinely comes from them -- they also create the environment that encourages the rest of it. Actively, it seems, and intentionally.

I won't do anything spam wants me to do. Simple, really.

Ever.

4. And don't get me started on PayPal. I will never touch them with a ten foot Firefox browser tab. Never, ever, ever, ever. They can pry my money from my cold, dead fingers. Actually, no, they can't, because I have willed every last dime to my close kin, and none of them use PayPal either.

5. Why can't they at least pay lip service to honesty, and format CC numbers as three groups of six digits each, so at least "he who has wisdom" will recognize the threat? :P