The Way Things Work #2

The process of learning to navigate daily tasks in an unfamiliar, developing country (downtown Santiago looks like any big U.S. city, but, at the same time, under a quarter of the country's highways are paved and its per capita GDP is far lower than the big guys) reveals all those little differences that define life outside the West/North bubble. So, mundane tasks like paying bills or buying groceries become a study in economics and development. E.g., at stores, even just supermarkets, you’re invariably asked if you want to pay in installments—a testament to the fact that salaries are low and credit cards relatively rare here.

Anyway, in this process of acclimating, I noticed something that I’m used to taking for granted was missing (besides spicy food and peanut butter, other serious lacks): People here don’t seem to use mail. I don’t mean there isn’t a mail system—there is—or that it isn’t used at all. Bills arrive anonymously at my house, presumably delivered by a mailman. Items sent to me from the U.S. have (mostly) found their way to my door. Businesses certainly make use of the many private, and one public, mail companies when necessary. But as far as I can tell, average people avoid the post office. This impression was confirmed by my Spanish teacher, who (when I asked her where to buy stamps and where to mail letters) informed me that she never mails anything. It was further confirmed when I scanned the many payment options on the back of my various household bills—pay in cash or by check at the Chilectra or Metrogas office, pay at banks, pay at a chain payment center like your local Servipag franchise, pay at convenience stores—only to find the option to pay by mail printed in miniscule letters at the bottom. In vain I looked for the pre-printed, easy-pay envelope that used to come with my U.S. bills. Similarly, when the telephone company wanted to give me a stovetop barbecue kit as a thank-you gift for buying service, a Telefonica worker delivered it in person.

The lack of a widely used postal system can be felt when you get in line at the bank or the Chilectra office on the first of the month. Lines curl their way around lobbies, spilling hurried people holding 10,000-peso bills out the front door and onto the sidewalk. Yet the back of my bills offer another option among those meriting normal-sized (read: readable) print: Pay online. You can sign up for an account with an online payment company that will debit your bank account and manage all your bills. Within two weeks, you can start using the service for the cost of around 50 cents per bill paid. It’s fast and relatively easy and so much more civilized than similar U.S. services that charge a subscription rate of something like $15 a month. In other ways, too, Santiago is as wired as the Bay Area, and probably more wired than many U.S. cities.

Which leads me to my question (a long time in coming, I know): Does modern development mean skipping steps? Is Santiago bypassing mail to hop straight from cash-under-the-mattress banking (it’s still more common here to have a cash-only bank account than an account that gives you a debit card with it—and probably most common of all not to have a bank account, period) to internet click-culture? Maybe this is the way of 21st century development. But, here at least, daily life still schizophrenically mixes the old ways with the new. When we set up our online payment account, we entered all our information online and confirmed it by email with the company. Then we printed an approval form, signed it…and waited for the company representative to come pick it up. After all, what were we going to do—mail it?