I Wonder

I Wonder

Do we ever really get things figured out? I wonder.

Yesterday, on my four-mile walk, I noticed that my little town has quite a few payday loan shops, rent-to-own stores, and places where you give them the title to your car or motorcycle and they give you a cash loan. Seems odd to me that we have so many in a town of so few.

Maybe I noticed it yesterday for the first time because I was reading an article that was ranking the world’s richest men (and women). And I was shocked to see that Elon Musk will be the world’s first trillionaire.

I mean a trillion is a big number. Not one of us will even come close to living for a trillion seconds. A trillion seconds is over 36,000 years.

Once the world’s richest man, Bill Gates now precariously clings to third or fourth place, far behind Elong Musk, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and perhaps Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook).

I suppose it would be un-American to put some kind of limit on how much money someone can make. But on the other hand someday all the world’s wealth will be controlled by a very few – maybe it already is.

If you had a billion dollars you could spend $24 every single minute of your 80-year life –  that’s $10,800 every single week of your life. Now imagine having well over 100 Billion like all those aforementioned gentlemen.

Think of all the good those hundreds of billions of dollars could do

A 2022 report estimated that 8 million children… were suffering from severe wasting; over 27 million children were living in severe food insecurity; and over 40 million children are living in severe food poverty, with limited diets that lack nutrition required during early childhood for healthy growth and development.

A 2024 report by the Global Network Against Food Crises — of which UNICEF is a part — estimated that worldwide, there were 36 million acutely malnourished children, noting the sharp deterioration of food security in the Gaza Strip and Sudan…

Some 148 million children in the world — about 1 in 5 — are chronically malnourished to some degree…
(Read more here.)

One hundred billion dollars would feed every single one of those malnourished children for an entire year or more. It’s a shame it won’t ever happen.

Anyway, between the unfathomably wealthy people like those aforementioned, and the “ordinary rich” and the very poor are the people like you and me. We pay our bills, we make ends meet, and we generally live within our means – and if we’re lucky, once in a while we get to splurge on a vacation, a new car, a steak dinner, a night on the town – or maybe just going to a baseball game or a movie.

Yesterday, while I was walking, it dawned on me that some of the rich people got that way by taking advantage of the poor, the uneducated, and (or) the undisciplined.

Someone with money saw a way to provide what they call a “service” to the disadvantaged by figuring out a way to take what little they have away from them and bait them into a trap from which few will ever escape.

On my walk, I passed 3 payday loan stores, 1 cash-for-your-car-title-loan store, and 2 rent-to-own stores. All in a town of less than 20,000 people. From this, I deduced we have a lot of poor, undereducated, and (or), undisciplined people living in my little town.

The payday loan industry in my state uses loopholes in the usury laws to charge interest rates of 300% or higher. Rent-to-own stores are charging $2000+ for a $500 computer. And Cash loans for (mainly) car titles rip folks off by charging “processing fees”, “insurance fees” and security deposits. All of these are, of course, added into the loan – on top of the 30%, 40% or higher interest rate. So, a poor soul with no credit who needs cash has an old car worth $2000. He gives the store the title to the car and they give him $500; he now has to pay back a loan for $800 – at 30% or higher interest. And, of course, many cannot keep up with the payments, so the lender takes possession of the car – and does not have to return any monies to the borrower.

And that’s how some people get wealthy.

This kind of thing goes on every day. Business people will say “So what? It’s business. It’s not our fault people have poor credit (or make low wages, are uneducated, or ignorant). People who have bad or no credit dug the hole in which they find themselves. People who are poorly educated and unskilled work for low wages.

And, of course, the poor, the uneducated, and the ignorant are always with us.

It takes a certain kind of person to take advantage of those kinds of people and still be able to sleep at night.

Of course, many people don’t become wealthy this way. However, on my walk, I didn’t see any Musks, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Buffets, I just saw a lot of places taking advantage of the poor, unlucky, downtrodden, and uneducated, and getting rich by taking advantage of those poor folks.

As I sit here writing this today, I think back to 2005 and 2006 when we (Cloudeight) welcomed over three million visitors every month. Our mailing list was over 250,000 and we were doing amazingly well.

Back then, there was hardly a week that went by when some company or another wasn’t offering us 50 cents or a dollar per download to bundle their “software” with our stationery or software installers. At that time, we were averaging 5000 downloads every day, and around Christmastime, we were averaging twice that. We had days when served over 50,000 downloads.

We could have been generating $2500 a day on an average day – even at 50 cents per download. That’s nearly a million dollars a year… and that’s just based on the average day. All things considered and counting the busy days, we could have been making close to $1,250,000 every year.

We could have justified bundling our stationery and other programs with malware, PUPS, and other questionable software. We could have justified that by reasoning that we invested thousands of hours and a lot of hard work into our site and our stationery – so we deserved it. We earned it. We deserved to be wealthy.

But we never felt right about tricking people or ruining the good reputation we worked so hard to earn. We never even considered bundling anything with our software downloads.

Getting rich by taking advantage of people was never part of our DNA.

In 2009 when Windows 7 was released and had no included email program, we knew the end of our wildly successful stationery site would come within a year or two — as the number of people using Outlook Express and/or Windows Mail dwindled from hundreds of millions to just a few million and eventually to none at all.

Sadly, it happened just like we thought it would.

Our magical, musical, scrolling stationery we both loved making so much, was no longer compatible with other email programs. So, we either had to go out of business or reinvent ourselves. We chose the latter and started Cloudeight Direct Computer Care to provide an affordable, reliable, honest Computer care and repair service dedicated to helping people with their computers.

Honestly, we don’t ever look back and think “If only we had bundled 3rd-party software with our installers we’d be rich” and while we would have been, we are not that kind of people.

Maybe that’s why we’ll never get rich. But that’s OK. As long as we can make ends meet and pay our bills, it’s worth it, because we love helping people… we love what we do.

We never even considered breaking the trust we spent years building, even though it would have made us both wealthy. We never sold out those who trusted us to provide them with clean downloads and beautiful stationery. And though today we’re a very much smaller, almost forgotten company than we were 15-20 years ago, we are so grateful that we still have a lot of the friends we made all those years ago.

My walk among all the money predators yesterday was a reminder that money does not buy happiness. Money does not buy trust. We’ll never be rich – but no matter how bad things get – we’ll never be poor either. We’ll never be in Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people but being rich doesn’t always have to mean having a lot of money. We are rich because of what we do have – amazing families and a lot of good friends – good friends like you.

Do any of us ever get things figured out? Do any of us know why things work the way they do?

I wonder.