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The Existential Horror of Financing a Burrito. (Essay)
🕑 Added 2025-06-03 19:54:08 +0000 UTCThe Existential Horror of Financing a Burrito.
If you’re reading this, you can now go into debt for a burrito. literally finance your fast food in four easy payments via a buy now pay later app called Klarna and their partnership with door dash, But this essay isn’t about fast food. It’s about the never ending war on your soul, how markets evolve to wring you for every last dollar you will potentially have, and why fast food financing is just the beginning of how rotten and wretched capitalism is becoming. I’m not an anti-capitalist but hey man, I’ll call it when I see it.
Klarna explained.
Klarna is a Swedish fintech company that operates on a buy now pay later model. Don’t have the money to make a purchase immediately? Klarna allows you to either pay in 4 installments or defer the payment to a later date. They’ve operated on rapid expansion via funding while running at a loss for the past 6 years, a process known as “Blitzscaling”. Corner the market as fast as possible and the money will eventually come via a monopoly. Uber did this, surviving on funding alone as it ran at a loss for 7 years until they became so ubiquitous that “ubering” is now a catch-all euphemism for the concept of having an immigrant drive you to pick up coke. While Klarna was running at a loss, they successfully raised 639 million in a single round of funding with a valuation of 45.6 Billion in 2021. The most valued tech startup in Europe at the time. Since then they have garnered a user base of 100 million and have 724,000 merchant partners including Aritzia, Walmart, and most recently, DoorDash, but we’ll get there.
Klarna is an explicitly predatory company that targets a young and financially precarious consumer base. 70% of Klarna’s customers are millennial or Gen-z and 41% missed at least one payment in the last four quarters, up from 34% the prior year. Their mass expansion into almost three quarters of a million vendors means that we are increasingly faced with the opportunity to go into debt at every possible checkout. It’s exciting to think that you, a middling brokie, could own a pair of Geobaskets and only pay $250 at checkout rather than the full $1k. Make your payments every 2 weeks and you’re good to go. You can pull up to the Bushwick barcade and pick up a wasian baddie with your fresh new Ricks. (I think, I don’t know what people in Brooklyn do). However, miss your payments and you will be charged interest. Sometimes up to 30% on the principal. Much like a mobster or a payday loan company they will squeeze every last fucking dime out yo broke ass and cackle menically as they do so. But you’re probably asking, If I’m paying something off on Klarna, then I’m technically in debt, but where does this debt get recorded?
Phantom Debt
Mortgages, credit, student and car loans, all get recorded on credit reports. Your unpaid debt, along with your ability to pay said debt on time, is added together into your credit score so any financial institution knows how safe you are to lend to. That way, companies can lend you money and be pretty sure you’ll pay it back. Companies generally want to avoid lending to people who are likely to default. Last time this happened it created a global financial crisis. But we’re not talking about mortgages, we’re talking about owing $500 dollars to a swedish app because you impulse bought a flight to Bangkok to fuck some bussy, How do our financial overlords know that you are $500 dollars in debt to a swedish app. Well that’s that thing, they don’t.
Klarna’s rapid expansion has been strategic in two ways. One; they get to push out competition like affirm and afterpay, and two; they are growing so fast they can outpace regulators. Here’s a quote from a Wells Fargo report on the buy now pay later market in 2024,“The BNPL market may be small now, but if we don’t know how fast it’s growing, it logically follows that we simply cannot know when it will be a problem.”
Klarna’s outpacing of proper regulation means that we don’t know how much debt has accumulated, it’s not recorded on credit reports. This is what is known as “phantom debt”.
This same Wells Fargo report estimated that, given the size and average amount spent on BNPL apps, there was around 46 billion dollars of this phantom debt in the US economy in the Q1 of 2024. An amount they said contributed to 1/3rd of all new credit debt that quarter. But this is still just an estimate as they literally don’t know. The most unnerving part is that this industry is still growing rapidly with some estimates putting the annual amount spent at almost 700 billion dollars by 2030, that’s almost a trillion dollars of unrecorded debt from a predatory company whose stated goal is to expand into every retailer possible. This brings us to the story that has thrust this company into the lime light, their partnership with Doordash.
In March 2025 Klarna announced that they will be partnering with DoorDash to allow you to use Klarna on DoorDash orders, this will launch in the US on June 1st 2025. That means if you are currently reading this, you can go to DoorDash, make an order over $35, and choose an option to pay off that order in 4 installments, going into debt for fast food. You can go as deep into debt as your stomach can handle so long as you get approved by Klarna’s AI risk calculator.
YES! forgot to mention they use an algorithm that weighs your risk based on the sort of items you purchase, your account balance, and how late you’ve been on payments. From this data you are attributed a “credit score” in the app's internal logic and this score changes frequently with every little decision you make, a process they refer to as “dynamic underwriting”. The worst part is you don’t even fucking gain anything. It’s not like your credit score goes up like when you pay off a car or make your credit card payment, you either pay off the order for its listed price or you go into an interest driven death spiral.
Anyways, pass the AI driven vibe check and you will be deemed worthy to finance fast food. This was Klarna’s plan all along, to monopolize a market completely driven by impulse, 20 somethings ordering Mc Gangbangs on their phones. You’ve seen this very topic covered ad nauseam all over YouTube and social media with terms like “burrito loans”, but there is something that all of these pieces have completely missed. You see, Klarna’s gambit was never to help you finance fast food, that’s just a nice side effect. DoorDash doesn’t just deliver fast food, they deliver groceries.
25% of Monthly DoorDash users ordered from non-restaurant categories in Q4 of 2024 and non restaurant categories are the primary driver of DoorDash’s current year over year growth. This was always Klarna’s goal, to put the most financially precarious population in a position where they could finance their groceries. The sad part is BNPL apps have been traditionally used for one off purchases since their initial boom during the pandemic. Things you don’t need to repurchase like electronics and clothing. The DoorDash partnership alters this model by getting customers potentially dependent on financing everyday essentials like laundry detergent, toilet paper, and diapers. On top of this, Klarna allows you to forgo the standard checks and balances of credit card approval. What are they gonna do if they gotta repossess your diapers, unshit your pants?
Klarna’s business plan is to eliminate as much friction as possible between your income and your purchases. The slow march of techno-capital is an increasingly frictionless glide. Want food? Go pick it up. Don’t want to leave your house? DoorDash it. Don’t have the money? Finance it. Don’t think about it, don’t consider the variables, you’re always 2 taps away from going into crippling debt, a never ending war between you and your own freedom whenever you open your phone. Friction is lost profit. The same logic applies to apps like Temu which load their UI with little games and in-app points to give you the illusion of free products. Amazon, with its ever increasing infrastructure of deliverance, which guarantees your purchases are on your front step before you can second guess why you ever ordered that Evangelion toothbrush. The proverbial race to the bottom of the brainstem on every plain of existence, but why does this happen? To understand this, we have to understand the logic of evolution itself, refinement culture.
Refinement culture.
Imagine if the entire universe was Ocarina of Time. The big bang happened on November 21st 1998, the day the game was released. Ocarina of Time was known for its magnetic story telling, exploration, and complicated puzzles. The water temple daunted all without a guide or older brother to lead one through its labyrinth, But as the game ages, as time goes on, the strategies emerge. As this universe advances so do the competitive strategies that put some players above others like evolution itself. Fast forward 4 years to 2002 and one could access this comprehensive gamfaqs guide for free on the internet, guiding players through its least accessible aspects. Players begin to master the game's mechanics, learning to do that weird back hop thing and complete it in record times of around four hours. Move forward to around 2006 where exploits and skips emerge, knocking the games completion time down to under 23 minutes by 2013. This process of refinement continues as more metas emerge. Wrong warping, stale reference manipulation, arbitrary code execution, all refining the process of game completion to where the current world record sits at 3:50. The game's story telling and optional mechanics become entropy, an inefficient friction in a process that is nearly perfect. For one to enjoy the game in the way it was supposed to be enjoyed, it must be played intentionally. Exploits, glitches, and completing the game as an end goal must be purposefully avoided. Okay maybe this example is too abstract so what about this.
Refinement is the process of knowledge building upon itself to find the most optimized course of action. This is perhaps the single greatest human advantage. You cast a fishing line into a river with a peanut on the end, you see a school of fish circles to investigate the nut but none choose to take the bait. Without refinement, one might conclude that fish simply can’t be caught and to abandon the project of fishing altogether. You walk back to your village and tell everyone “hey guys, fish can’t be caught, never try to catch a fish again, I tried it and it can’t be done”. However, if one refines the process. If one deduces that the fish were interested in the nut but didn’t bite, and maybe if one used different bait like, say, the humble earth worm, the fish might bite next time. One has refined the process through slight tweaks based on knowledge deduced from previous attempts. Never again will a nut be used as bait, the nut becomes entropy, and the earth worm has gotten us closer to absolute truth, the most optimal way to catch a fish.
Take a look at this chart of car colors over the past 30ish years. Unsurprising to anyone who has left their house in the past month is the fact that our roads are now dominated by black, white, and silver cars. Or this chart showing the shift of fonts used by different brands, again showing the shift away from unique variables. Average basketball shot locations from 2000 vs 2023. Carcinisation, the convergent evolutionary pattern where all non-crab crustaceans evolve into crabs. These are all examples of refinement culture. There is an ideal way to throw a basketball, there is a car color that is most easily marketable, there is a perfect way to be a crustacean, and these truths emerge through time. Refinement is present across all facets of existence, a thousand singularities. This is because refinement is an inherent quality of time itself, the longer a process plays out, the more optimized it becomes and the more inefficiencies, or entropy, is created. No where else is this process more present than the free market.
In an email to vox in 2019 the philosopher Nick Land said that “Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its motor,”. This concept of self escalation is analogous to refinement. Capital always seeks the path of least resistance, an evermore frictionless interaction between consumer and consumed. This is the reason all developed societies transition from manufacturing to service based economies. Service allows capital to flow more freely as it doesn’t require physical goods to hold value. Manufacturing requires tangible goods. For an economy to make money by exporting steel, the country must have enough steel to support an export market. The value of money is tied to steel as a physical object, but value itself isn’t a physical object, value is a construct. If steel is worth 30 cents a pound, and I destroy a pound of steel, steel is still worth 30 cents a pound.
The ethereal nature of value is far more congruent with service economies as they move away from material goods. Service economies are contingent on education, entertainment, hospitality, IT, and fintech. Services that require little if no physical manifestation to produce capital, far more optimal than an economy tied to physical goods. Furthermore, services are infinitely scaleable. A steel economy hinges on supply and demand based on the amount of steel. A service economy, untethered from material objects, hinges on attention towards the service. If I make a YouTube video, the only cost of its production is the time it took to make, but the video is an infinite resource. It can be viewed one time or it can be viewed ten million times. I don’t need to make a video for every viewer and the video's value is contingent on how many times it’s viewed, a process of value production that is, for all intents and purposes, infinitely scalable. One can look at meme coins as the ultimate manifestation of infinite ethereal value.
Meme coins are driven by hype itself as a pure force. There is no dogecoin, there is only the concept of which traders adhere to participate in the exchange of the idea, and now this process is so ethereal it can be automated. A trader’s labour is spent monitoring the market in order to predict the ideal time to buy or sell. This process would be far more optimal if a dedicated algorithm were to do the monitoring. The trader simply has to set the AI system up and then rake in the profit. A fully deterritorialized exchange. This process of refinement towards frictionless exchange is the unavoidable end point of the market. This is all to say, one shouldn't be surprised at the fact that Klarna now allows you to finance a burrito.
The Klarna doordash partnership makes absolute sense when you understand that refinement is unstoppable. Allowing consumers to accrue debt through impulsive fast food purchases, or better yet, allowing them to go into debt for everyday essentials, is just another refinement of capital's water like nature. This is inevitable. saying the market will always refine is like saying the sun will shine tomorrow. It always will, and if it doesn’t, we’re probably dead. This refinement process has also contributed to Klarna’s ability to dodge regulators and the accumulation of phantom debt. Like an arms race between viruses and anti-virus software, capital will always outpace its detractors.
This sucks. I know I sound ambivalent but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this isn’t a good thing. Refinement itself isn’t inherently bad, it’s just a process. Refinement has given us the unprecedented rise of medical breakthroughs. Refinement allows the economy to adjust on its own so we don’t have to stand in ration lines. Basically any modern luxury we take for granted has come through the process of refinement. But within this refinement is the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself, something that has been written about for over a century by thinkers like Karl Marx and Henry George. The fact that the more capital optimizes, the more it concentrates, the less people have the ability to participate. Markets are driven by their participants. Burrito debt inhibits people from further participating in the market. We ourselves become inefficiencies in a process that seems to no longer need human input or participation. For every constructive force, there’s an equally destructive force. Nick Land famously said “Nothing human makes it out of the near future”, a statement that grows eerily foreboding as we refine ourselves out of existence.
Take the idiot pill.
The Klarna DoorDash collab isn’t just bad, it’s a product of something deeply horrifying. But it wouldn’t be an Art Chad essay if I didn’t remind you that you have free will. It’s easy to speak of these things in the abstract, to speak of the end of society as if it’s a movie plot playing out, but regardless of this, you will still wake up tomorrow. You aren’t a mindless process playing out like a line of code, you’re a human being. Everything may feel like it’s trying to destroy you, you may be fighting a never ending battle for your soul when you open your phone, but you’re still in control. You decide whether you want to go in debt for pizza, you decide whether you are still going to live a happy and fulfilling life just to spite those who want to wring you dry for every last drop of your value. Is capital a never ending refinement machine that wants to optimize you out of existence? Yes of course i just went through all that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t close this essay and call some friends up for a beer, go for a walk, work on something you’re passionate about, or just choose to be content with it all. In a world where everything wants to destroy you, happiness is the only form of defiance. Delete all the food delivery apps off your phone this second and never kill yourself.
Comments
jovianartist
As someone who has worked on international e-commerce sites for a huge company for the last 20+ years, Klarna is nothing new. It is just new in the "first world". Similar services have existed for years in other countries, especially in Latin America. If we want to see our future in the US and Canada, we need only look to Mexico..
