Daily Observations: Computers and Credit Cards (Part II)
… We didn’t surrender though. After living in Mexico for a while, you learn that things are very rarely as they seem. So we called the store later in the evening. They told us that we could, in fact, pay with a foreign credit card. To make a long and boring story a little shorter, we went back to the store two more times, were not able to pay with the foreign credit card and called the store two more times before we were actually able to purchase the blessed laptop. It’s a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
This whole experience just reiterated two observations of Mexico. One is that living here is not always economical. There aren’t any good second-hand stores. Mercado Libre (the Latin American version of eBay) is usually just as expensive as buying something new in a store. Discounts are not so easy to come by. There will be more on that later, though.
The other observation is that people are just beginning to trust credit cards. Mexico has been through so much with devaluations and government corruption that lot of people prefer stashing their bills away under the mattress to an actual bank account. That may be exaggerating but the bottom line is that a lot of people don’t trust banks. And they have good reasons not to.
There will be more on that next time in the uplifting series on government corruption. Keep checking back for more…
