There’s Money in Being Inefficient

One Man’s Lost Change is Another Man’s Bounty

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Most days of the week, I start with a simple swipe. I take out my flimsy yellow-cab-looking plastic NYC MetroCard and slide it through the reader before pushing through the rotating gate. I don’t buy the monthly passes, since I don’t commute via subway every morning, so I fill up the card account each week or so. The balances always come out so strange number, like $26.65 on my last charge.

The funny thing is is that a charge for a single-ride swipe in NYC comes exactly to $2.75. I’ve calculated each permutation of card refills, and even with custom amounts, you’ll never be able to fully empty out your card evenly without at least a handful of cents left over.

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This fault is compounded by several other factors that all add up to a situation where money is sunk into nothing. Passes are easily lost (being almost paper thing and indistinguishable from others) and they eventually expire (why??). As a result, both tourists and residents alike never fully maximize the value they transfer into the system from fiat or credit.

Now, the issue of efficiency could easily be solved in many ways. New York could implement credit/debit card pairings like Korea so that trips are automatically and individually purchased through bank accounts. The city could make use of its own cryptocurrency and app-ify the transactions with pre-purchased and non-expiring credit. It seems strange that a system generations old still persists, even at the severe detriment of its user base.

• A 3rd party proposal for a Metrocard App. Source

But of course, this is because there is great profit in keeping the system outdated. Many parties already recognized the tactics that are used to soak up funds through the MTA system. Making these cards easy to lose, inefficient in terms of its use, and having absurd expiry dates are all purposeful makings of a lucrative business model that capitalizes on inefficiency.

When you begin to look at it in this light, you begin to identify all the ways in which economic practices are designed to take advantage of us, not actually provide a clean service. Bank wiring, for instance, could easily be reworked into an instantaneous and non-business-hour-reliant automated system that is feeless. Subscription services could easily cancel “free trials” if the consumer hasn’t made use of that offer within the trial time. Profit margins are heavily reliant on our own consumer mistakes and impatience.

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This is probably the most egregious part of daily life that I’ve become more and more fed up with as I’ve gotten deeper into the cryptocurrency world. We operate on so many outdated systems in our daily lives and it becomes more apparent that they are purposefully inefficient. The real question that comes to mind is “who is really profiting off of this service?” I can’t wait for a day when things are incentivized to fully benefit the consumer, maybe when consumers themselves are the equity holders of the products they use.

Until then, I’ll be sure to not lose my little yellow metrocards.