Are We All in the Squid Game?

At the fruit counter of a major supermarket, I felt the “squid-card” VIPs were watching me through the cameras hovering above, slurping champagne as the game unfolded.

Apples, 11,990 won if I swiped the right card, but 14,990 won for cash. A discount on life itself for those willing to play. I could almost hear the laughing VIPs, each representing a different Squid-Card, jostling for my debt, and placing side bets as the Moët continued to flow.

But these card discounts were nowhere to be found on junk food, ramen noodles, or cookies. They weren’t on non-foods either. The discounts were only on life-sustaining fresh fruit and vegetables. The food children, even poor children, need to grow.

But the “money” created by swiping a card doesn’t even exist; it’s conjured from nothing, numbers flickering on a screen. Nonetheless, fail to repay it, and they seize your real assets, your phone, your car, even your home. Those assets are then sold for hard cash, not digital numbers. This is the game’s paradox, debt is created from thin air, but the penalties are real life. Wealth quietly transfers upward. The intended endgame perhaps?

The card discount looks like a store gift. In reality, the store keeps its margins because card issuers reimburse or waive fees. But why would the VIPs pay for my apples? Because the apples are bait. Cheap fruit lures shoppers into bigger baskets, generating interchange fees to the card issuing VIP. Card use becomes habitual, some fall behind, accruing interest. That is where the true profits live.

But cash users, often the poorest, or blacklisted, once lured into easy credit, then spat out when they could not keep up with the payments, are charged 3,000 won more for the same apples.

Yet I found that at smaller marts, the same fruit is sold at the discounted price with no strings attached, suggesting cardholders aren’t receiving a reduction; they’re just paying the true price, while the poor are punished for non-compliance.

We can only imagine the Squid-Card VIPs huddled together in a dimly lit secret bunker beneath the retailer’s main freezer storage unit creating this plan. Well-educated but morally bankrupt executives, congratulating themselves on higher profits and fatter bonuses, while too many children go to school with no breakfast.

Meanwhile, the only form of resistance to this game, cash, is vanishing. Since 2019, South Korean banks have closed over 1,000 branches, 76 this year alone. Every closure pushes us deeper into the digital arena where the rules appear to be engineered against us.

This is not new. Back in 2002, a senior executive from a foreign card company in Seoul admitted to me, almost in frustration, that Koreans were too disciplined, most paid their card balances on time, leaving little room for profit on interest. But that discipline “was being addressed,” by pushing more credit onto consumers.

This frenzy came to a head in 2004 when LG Card collapsed under 12.6 trillion won in debt, triggering a billion-dollar bailout. And who paid? The working taxpayer, including many poorer people already crushed by their own card debts. The VIPs got their money back, and the game has rolled on ever since.

According to the Bank of Korea, delinquency rates for credit cards hit a 20-year high in May 2025, indicating financial strain for vulnerable borrowers.

South Korean household credit now sits at 1,952 trillion won, equal to 91% of GDP.

We can’t grasp the sheer scale of this number, so imagine it as seconds of time, not money.  1,952 trillion seconds is about 62 million years. That’s just after the dinosaurs became extinct.  

And what of government regulators? How can supposedly competing card companies be running the same game? When competition becomes collusion, the consumers always lose. Or perhaps a cashless society is the real policy objective, where every transaction is monitored, and dissenters can be switched off with a keystroke.

This is the Squid Game of our economy. A fear that no longer belongs to dystopian fiction.

The supermarket discounts and the vanished bank branches are cues in a rigged game. Debt is created from nothing, but its punishments are solid as steel. Sixty-two million years of debt, and VIPs slurping champagne; while the rest of us scramble for apples.

Anthony Hegarty MSc

The Korean version of this article appeared in the Maeil Shinbun Newspaper (print edition) on 4th September 2025

[앤서니 헤가티의 범죄 심리 - 인사이드 아웃] 우리 모두가 오징어 게임 속에 있는가? - 매일신문