There’s a new trend in China that you may find alarming. Young people who have little cash left at the end of the month, after spending most of their earnings on housing (sound familiar?) are buying hamburgers on credit. They use loans from the online company Fenqile, which roughly translates as “happy instalment”, to buy all sorts of stuff, from clothes and cosmetics to hot snacks, and spread the repayment over several years. It’s becoming a habit of young Chinese who don’t have much money, but are “still very optimistic about the future”, its founder told the South China Morning Post.
It sounds like a bad idea, but I would bet you a lot of eat-now, pay-later fries that it’s about to catch on here