Book Project

The proliferation of digital scoring technologies means that low-income users of financial services may be denied access not only to mainstream financial institutions, but also predatory alternative financial services markets.

How do these consumers at the financial margins devise novel and dynamic ways of managing their financial lives in an increasingly digitalized and surveilled financial landscape? And what can these circumstances tell us about the evolution of markets in response to gaps in traditional financial systems, more broadly?

To understand how these macro-level phenomena manifest in localized economic practices, I studied the Detroit-area’s most prevalent non-bank financial services provider. These providers are not the check cashing outlets, payday lenders, pawnshops, and money transfer stores that receive the lion’s share of attention in the research literature. Rather, they are neighborhood convenience and liquor stores, known throughout Detroit as “party stores,” which in addition to purveying alcohol and related products, serve as neighborhood financial hubs.

By focusing on these overlooked actors, the project reveals that financial lives at the margins are sustained not just by formal or predatory institutions, but also by informal, community-based arrangements that operate according to local norms and social orders, with informal financial arrangements emerging in direct response to market failures and exclusion from mainstream and alternative financial services.

Spending time in these spaces as well as the neighborhoods in which they are situated, I encountered the tension between market and community, the fringe and the mainstream, and discovered the unspoken rules by which these businesses operated and the sometimes desperate measures some patrons took as they navigated their precarious financial lives. For more than a year, I closed my own banking and credit accounts, joining the millions of American households who use “fringe” or nonbank financial transaction services in a given year (including money orders, check cashing, and bill payment). While high fees and interest rates generate most of the industry’s billions of dollars in revenue, I and my fellow corner store patrons accessed these services at rates significantly lower than standalone payday lenders or check cashing outlets.

My forthcoming book project (under contract with University of Chicago Press) offers a vivid ethnographic account of what happens in Detroit area neighborhoods where these fringe financial services abound, paying careful attention to how how urban inequality is both produced and contested.. It unsettles our ideas about what happens in the fringes of the economy and society, revealing how vulnerable patrons and financial service providers are, what they do about it, and how our understandings about financial inclusion might have consequences that are the opposite of what they intend.