Your washing machine may stop working when the instalment does

A financing model under discussion among retailers and consumer credit providers would build remote disablement into goods sold on instalments. A washing machine, a television or a motorised bed would arrive connected, and would remain fully functional for as long as the payments arrive. Should one not arrive, the appliance would not be collected and no letter would be sent. It would enter a reduced state, described in the draft documentation as a payment pause.

The word chosen would matter more than it looks. Repossession is a legal act, with notice periods, proportionality tests and, in most jurisdictions, a court. A firmware flag is a configuration change performed on a server by a process that has never been to the customer's flat and does not know it has a door.

The paused states would be designed with care. A fridge would keep cooling, because nobody wants that headline. A washing machine would finish the cycle it is running and decline the next one. A reclining sofa would return, slowly, to upright. Product teams would call this dignity-preserving, a phrase that would appear in the specification eleven times and in the marketing not once.

“The customer still owns the machine,” a spokesperson for the finance provider would say. “Ownership is not in question. What is temporarily suspended is operation.” Asked what ownership consists of, if not operation, the spokesperson would refer to the terms.

Consumer credit regulators would meet a familiar problem in an unfamiliar shape. The rules governing repossession assume something is being taken away, and therefore that somebody is coming. A remedy exercised through the absence of a signal would fall outside them by construction, while being considerably more effective than anything those rules were written to restrain.

The second-order effects would be the interesting ones. A household whose machine pauses would wash at a launderette for several times the cost, worsening the finances that caused the pause. Repair shops would report devices that are mechanically perfect and permanently silent. A resale market would emerge for appliances that work only while the original account is in good standing — which is to say, a resale market for objects that are not entirely being sold.

Technically, none of this is new. Starter-interrupt devices already disable cars over missed payments, farm equipment is already locked by software, and instalment credit now reaches from cars and sofas to the weekly shop. What would change is the size of the object. The mechanism was never the car. The mechanism is the idea that a purchase can be revoked from a distance, and washing machines have wifi now.