Thanks to Venmo, we now know the price for our friends.

The material is dedicated to the consequences of using the application for Venmo co-payments.



Margaret Pennoyer, a primary school teacher in Manhattan, just returned from her friends from a party in the Napa Valley and has already received an email sent to all guests. Two organizers calculated the costs at the party for each lady they assumed and asked to return them through Venmo, an application that transfers money between users who have linked their bank accounts to telephone numbers. Pennoyer owed $ 31.98 to one lady and $ 20.62 to another.
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In the old days, the organizers would probably ask everyone to bring enough cash to return the money in person, or they would ask to send a check by mail, kindly sweeping up expenses to $ 30 and $ 20. But the amounts in Venmo, calculated to the penny, hit the 29-year-old Pennoyer - in her opinion, they symbolize how most popular among her colleagues from the generation of two thousandth the application used for everything - from spending on entertainment to sharing the cost of renting housing, " changes friendships and makes them more petty, ”she says. "It literally makes you count pennies."

Theoretically, the Venmo service should make friendships less petty, as it provides almost imperceptible payments between friends - cash is not passed from hand to hand, checks are not written out. Nevertheless, the application not only encourages pettiness, calculating amounts up to a penny from the confusion of days, but also, perhaps, promotes the libertarian ideals of Silicon Valley, where everyone is only for himself, allowing him to return money to such small purchases as easily coffee.

“It makes people less generous and generous,” says Pennauer. - Previously, you came to a restaurant and paid your credit card on the bill in half, even if one person ordered steak, and the second chicken. But now people pay only for themselves - exactly to the penny. If you have three cookies, ”she adds,“ then let the other person eat two — you don’t have to split it in half. ”

Some users have noticed a decrease in the desire to take expenses on themselves, especially in the case of small purchases.

“I have a friend who is against Venmo - he believes that this service undermines the norms of social interaction,” said 30-year-old Zach Fuchs, who works in the field of direct investment in San Francisco, where the application is in use. For example, Fuchs notes that usually a colleague may consider himself obliged to pay for drinks the next time, but with Venmo he can immediately return the money for the drink to the one who paid for it, and forget about it.

Pennoyer agrees with him and recalls children's taxi rides when two adults vied to pay for the trip. Now, thanks to money transfer and bill sharing applications, such as Divvy, which takes a photo of a check from a restaurant and shares the bill between all guests, as well as the fare sharing feature built into Uber and Lyft (for a fee of 25 cents), “My generation no longer does that,” she says. “This is the difference between the words“ I will pay next time ”and“ I will transfer to you through Venmo ”.

As soon as two people decide to pay with Venmo, there is an additional awkwardness in the request for transfer. The easiest way is to turn the application into a verb, casually throwing out - “Just transfer me through Venmo”. But if you are at the bar and include someone's drinks in your account, then this request may be forgotten with the onset of the morning hangover. The application also allows users to request payment - in other words, send a formal invoice to a friend.

To assist in the maintenance of accounts, the application also asks users to leave short notes, which indicate why they need money. Markings are sometimes purely functional - “drinks”, “rentals” - but often comments are also rather bizarre - perhaps to soften the sense of business relationships.

“I pay you money, but this is not just a cash transaction,” says 26-year-old James Auchinkloss, a law student at Fordham University, about perceptions of less serious marks. “This is a reminder of what we did together. I lost count of how many people just send Emoji with a picture of a beer mug or a game sport. ”

However, such notes with emoji or exclamation marks have a visual aspect - especially since by default all transactions (albeit without specifying a specific dollar amount) and contact lists are publicly available. In addition, the application can use phonebook or Facebook contacts and add new contacts by default when they start using the service. Thus, it is similar to any other social network in which you can get lost for several hours, viewing financial transactions of other users (or simply viewing the list of "friends" of someone from Venmo). Literally a minute later I was able to see how my friend, with whom I was not even connected to the application, pays for the Internet and electricity, as her neighbor indicated these costs in the note.

You can make your register of payments and contacts confidential, but many users do not know about these parameters, they don’t care, or they even want everyone to see them - both for the purpose of documenting their experience both in the photo album and in order to demonstrate their lifestyle. . However, Venmo can turn into fear of being left out.

“Some part of me wants people to see what I do,” admits Auchinklos. "I even like it when people say," Oh, James went to baseball or sat in a bar with friends. "

While scrolling through the payment registers of her friends, Pennoyer saw that her two cousins ​​had recently met and had not invited her.

“From Venmo, you can also find out what is left behind, as well as from Instagram,” she says.

Although drawing attention to tickets in short supply or expensive food may envy someone’s friends, and philanthropic payments may hint at virtue, less glamorous or decent transactions can be noticed in the system. Pennoyer noticed how the mother of her friend sent her a transfer through Venmo marked “Benefit”.

“It's just awkward,” she says.

The Vicemo website displays a list of transactions with notes, in which keywords or emoji describe payments related to drugs, alcohol and sex. Some of them are obvious jokes (unless we live to see the time when crowds of decent young people buy crack), but nevertheless, the boss can easily find his subordinate in Venmo by his full name and discover a translation revealing the true causes of the time off.

Public transactions also mean that personal relationships often become more transparent and can be tracked.

“It’s easy to say who’s sleeping with whom, if you notice transfers between two people whom you considered to be just friends, but who seem to have become more than friends - because they leave traces in the form of their translations for Uber or joint breakfasts” - says Auchinkloss.

One man used Venmo to write a love note to his ex-girlfriend;
the screenshot quickly spread out among their mutual acquaintances and strangers.

There is a good side - 24-year-old Noam Waxman, who works in the field of digital marketing in New York, said that "friends gave him a beckoning because he forced his girlfriend to pay half of their restaurant bills", which they noticed at Venmo .

In turn, Waxman spied on the financial relations of other couples and saw how people sent “surprise transfers” through Venmo to their loved ones “with notes like“ Have a nice movie trip with friends, I love you, ”he says.

But the strongest manifestation of intimacy can be a denial of service in general. Fuchs and his fiancé used to use Venmo, but in preparation for their recent wedding, they opened a joint checking account and now all expenses are attributed to him.

“We stopped paying each other,” he says.