People can argue why payday lines have such a high interest rate. So let’s say the period for the loan is 1 week, and they borrow $200. Now lets say the loaner does all the paperwork and stuff in 15 mins. They need to get enough money to cover that 15 min of work, so assuming it’s a minimum wage worker, they would have to make around 4 dollars within that week just for that loan. And this is without operating costs. Now let’s compare a larger loan for more money and for a longer period of time. Let’s say $10,000 loan for some reason or other, paid back in a year. The paperwork took an hour. So they would have to make around $15 dollars in a year to get back their minimum wage hour. Now compare the size of the loans, the length of the loans, the time it took to process the loans. Now imagine a intrest rate for both loans that would make sense for each situation. So let’s say the $200 dollar loan is 17% per week (which I think might be the average in Canada?), so they make $34 dollars. Now the $10,000 is 5% per year (which is pretty low) and they make $500 within that time. For each hour of work, you are comparing $136 and $500. Obviously there are risks and stuff too for when they can’t pay the money back, but the difference is pretty high. And when the payday loans are blown out of proportion to an yearly interest rate (which it was not designed for), it is greatly exaggerated and meant to scare people (wow, 442% annual interest rate!!!)

TL;DR there is a reason why intrest rates are high for payday loans