It’s a bit like payday loans; they are a bad financial deal, but the alternative is no credit at all because the people who get them are high-risk borrowers and the costs associated with making and servicing a loan aren’t radically different for $500 or $50k.

Being poor is tough. But the low margins are a pretty good indicator that the alternative to shady businesses is simply not having businesses at all.

LOL it just seems that no business can do right here. So these low margin stores should just shutter and close up shop because they are somehow still "screwing poor people"? Would you commend them if their business just infinitely ran at a loss or gave people cash at the register instead of charging them anything for the items that they want?

Wait, why? I get the emotional resonance of this, but unless their marketing spend is egregious I just don’t know how you can argue their whole business model is predatory.