The proper etiquette of the Venmo nudge

Wailin Wong (0:01)

Okay, Darian, would you rather eat a shoe or sign up for the Indicator newsletter?

Eric Doane (0:06)

Sign up for the Indicator newsletter.

Wailin Wong (0:07)

Great, you can sign up at npr.org/indicatornewsletter.

Eric Doane (0:14)

N-P-R.

Darian Woods (0:19)

This is The Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Ricky Mulvey.

Wailin Wong (0:22)

And I'm Wayland Wong. Splitting a bill used to be a pain. You had to have the right amount of cash, maybe you wrote a personal check, remember those?

Darian Woods (0:30)

I do.

And now you'd think it would be a lot easier with instant payment apps. Venmo, for example, had more than 100 million active accounts at the end of last year. The app made $1.7 billion for its parent company PayPal.

Wailin Wong (0:43)

And that's just from fees on Venmo extras, not the interest the company gets from holding onto your Venmo balance.

Darian Woods (0:51)

Venmo is so popular that it's become a verb, to collect a debt or pay someone back. And most people pay their Venmo requests back promptly, within the day they receive them.

Wailin Wong (1:02)

But that's not always the case.

Darian Woods (1:04)

A Venmo rep shared data with us. About 40% of people take a week or more to settle up debts with friends. Transferring money is easy, but asking for your money back can get more complicated.

Eric Doane (1:16)

Everything's been transactionalized and it's not a good feeling.

Wailin Wong (1:20)

That's Eric Doane. He's had some problems with friends paying him back.

Darian Woods (1:23)

Today on the show, how do you ask your friends to pay you back? We've got an etiquette coach to help with that, and we have our own ideas.

Wailin Wong (1:35)

You might know William Hansen from Instagram, where he offers advice on topics like eating peas without looking like a classless savage. Yeah, I'm talking to you.

William Hansen (1:44)

What we never do with peas is shovel them onto the underside of the fork and bring them up to the mouth, because they fly everywhere, and we don't want that.

Darian Woods (1:53)

If shoveling peas into my mouth is wrong, then I don't want to be right. And also, I could use a spoon to shovel, thank you very much.

William is a British etiquette coach. He says that many of his friends are prompt about paying him back. However, that's not always the case. William says that he went to a barbecue, and the hosts ran out of gas for the grill.

William Hansen (2:12)

My husband and I and some other friends went to a nearby hardware store to get the gas tank filled up.

I paid. I'm still waiting for that money back.

Wailin Wong (2:23)

William's friend knows that they owe him money.

William Hansen (2:26)

It's almost got to the fairly amusing point now, where I think they know what they're doing. But actually, it was an hour ago, I was having this conversation with this person, and you're like, just take your phone out now and do it. You can literally just do it now. It's so, so easy.

Darian Woods (2:42)

This is a pain point in the digital economy. Transferring money is frictionless. That doesn't mean it's always easy.

Wailin Wong (2:48)

Yeah, it's really easy to delay that $5 you owe someone for coffee if you can just swipe away the notification. It's harder to ignore your friend's request in person.

William Hansen (2:58)

With actually with all of these sort of labor-saving devices and technologies that we have, it's actually made us sloppier. So it probably has pushed us in the complete opposite direction to how you would think it would make us go.

Darian Woods (3:13)

Yeah, William believes that the effortless transfer of money hasn't always made us better about paying people back.

Wailin Wong (3:18)

So we asked William to weigh in on two types of etiquette problems. First, what do you do when someone is taking forever to pay you back?

Darian Woods (3:26)

Derek Holden has had that experience a lot.

Derek Holden (3:29)

Some people, for whatever reason, when you do an event, go somewhere, concert, a sports game, et cetera, you'll send them a message or they'll owe you the money because you covered everything, right? And then the split, you send the request. But for whatever reason, they just ignore it.

Darian Woods (3:47)

William, our etiquette coach, says it's okay to send a reminder a little faster.

William Hansen (3:52)

I would leave it 48 hours before a reminder. But obviously it depends on if you're seeing them the next day, you can remind them in person.

Wailin Wong (3:59)