The New York Times reported on September 8 that buy now, pay later lending, which began in Europe and Australia about 15 years ago and exploded in the U.S. during the pandemic, is expanding from retail checkout into everyday essentials like rent, utilities and groceries. Americans spent roughly $160 billion through such loans last year, and Flex alone does about $2 billion a month in rent loans, having expanded this year into utilities and auto loans. Nearly half of users say they made a late payment in the last year, per LendingTree, and 29 percent used the loans for groceries, double the share from a couple of years ago. The discussion centers on light underwriting and automatic bank-account repayment.