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Once upon a time, my central Edmonton neighbourhood was filled with banks.

On one corner, there was a Scotiabank, on another a Toronto-Dominion, on another a Royal Bank.

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But that was years ago. As the banks consolidated and closed their corner neighbourhood branches, the spaces they left were taken over by payday loan companies, with their sweet promises of instant cash.

Of course, such “easy” money comes at a painfully high price.

Currently in Alberta, such cash stores are allowed to charge $23 for every $100 a customer borrows, to a maximum of $1,500.

That means a $300 payday loan, taken out for 14 days, costs $69 — effectively an annual interest rate of 600 per cent. Standard credit card interest rates are already high at 20 to 25 per cent.

There’s a good old-fashioned word for the kind of gouging that cash stores do: usury.

These firms — and there are more than 30 of them operating in Alberta — trap the most vulnerable and desperate in a cycle of subsistence borrowing. Instead of improving their credit ratings or learning to manage their money, some customers end up deeper in debt, paying fees and penalties when they can’t make their payments, growing more and more dependant on expensive borrowed money to get through every month.