Maintaining an appropriately fashionable abode, with appropriately massive TV screen and appropriately loud home-theatre system is an expensive task, particularly for the bogan whose weekly income still relies on nightfilling at Woolies. Thankfully, the proprietors of equally massive retailers like Harvey Norman saw a hole in the market, and decided to fill it. So now, bogan dreams can be fulfilled, by getting FREE STUFF!
The bogan equivalent of a bug-zapper.
That’s right, these kindly salespeople will let bogans walk into their store, pick out a 320cm LCD screen and carry it back to the Holden without paying a cent! Sure, you had to sign a couple of forms before they let you leave, but so what? Time to head home and watch Border Security in high-definition surround sound!
Of course, none of this takes into account the monthly fees that are mentioned in the fine print of the contract. None of this mentions the 35% monthly interest that the account accrues immediately upon missing one of these payments, or the 60% interest once the 18 months are up. And it certainly doesn’t include burly men arriving at your door at 3pm, menacingly playing with little Shayleigh and Jaxon, with the implication of kidnap and violence should the withheld funds fail to be procured.
Access to easy credit has been blamed for a lot of things of late, and the bogan’s love of free money lies at the heart of all of our economic woes. Subprime mortgages! No job? No Assets? No worries! Here’s $400,000 to buy a house on the Californian coast! Credit card bill catching up on you? That’s cool, here, have….another credit card!
Often, when confronted with thousands of dollars of debt, or a looming home repossession, an ordinary person would suck it up and change their spending habits. However, the bogan is wiser. Cannily placing a call to the producers of Today Tonight or A Current Affair, they manage to position themselves – on national television – as the innocent, only slightly naïve victims of malicious predators. The most skilled bogans will manage to turn the entire episode into a charitable fundraiser, as caring bogans everywhere pledge their financial support. Probably because they, too, remember the sting of Harvey Norman’s terms of finance.