The American consuming public never ceases to amaze.

In the pre-crash era, it was nothing for them to loot their home equity to buy luxury cars or boats or RVs or lavish vacations. They would over-spend their means to buy a 4,000-square-foot new house because that cute 2,500-square-footer was “just too small.”

They spent money like they stole it, and many of them did – by lying on their credit apps. Aided and abetted by mortgage companies and banks and financial arms that were more than happy to heap debt on those demonstrating the least common sense.

A week or so ago, a young reporter from NPR called me for comment regarding news she had picked up from the Los Angeles Times about rampant tire price increases. “Prices were up like 5%,” she exclaimed. “Why was this happening?”

Well, it wasn’t, and over the next 30 minutes I explained the course of the last decade of raw material increases and shifting production emphasis and U.S. tariffs. Her unsubstantiated comment lacked in historical context or perspective; it was the typical 0-60 mph knee-jerk reaction we have come to know and love in this business.

The point of her resulting article shifted away from “outrageous tire price increases” to the even more outrageous act of renting tires, which was the subject of the L.A. Times article she, in fact, had referenced.

That June 8 story by Ken Bensinger has attracted more attention to the rent-a-tire business than advertising can buy, and it laid bare how misdirected consumers really can be.

The lead of his piece spoke of a middle-aged North Carolina couple (she a nurse, he a prison guard) who were paying Rent-N-Roll an amazing $54.60 monthly for 18 months for a set of Hankook tires – mounted on a 15-year-old Dodge Caravan. That worked out to $982.

"I know you have to pay a lot more this way," said the woman. "But we didn’t really have a choice."

Really? There were no other tires or stores or prices?

“Socked by soaring tire prices and short on funds, growing numbers of Americans are renting the rubber to keep their cars rolling,” Bensinger wrote. “Rent-to-own tire shops are among the newest arrivals to a sprawling alternative financial sector focused on the nation’s economic underclass. Like payday lenders, pawn shops and ‘Buy Here, Pay Here’ used-car lots, tire rental businesses provide ready credit to consumers who can’t get a loan anywhere else. But that access doesn’t come cheap.”

Chains like Rent-N-Roll, Rimco, RimTyme, Rent-a-Wheel, EZ Rims 4 Rent and others popped up in the mid-1990s when younger folk were looking to spend big dollars they didn’t have on bright, shiny wheels and performance tires they really didn’t need. As the tuner and modification markets grew – and wheel sizes blew past 20 inches to 32 – renting big wheels and bigger tires was the only way some pockets could compete on bling.

The crash killed the tuner and big wheel business, but apparently opened the door to cash-strapped drivers in sore need of new rubber.

“Since 2009, median household income has fallen more than 5%,” Bensinger wrote. “And in the wake of the recession, the number of households in the country with credit histories too damaged to qualify for most credit cards has risen to 35% from 27% five years ago.”

He recounted the plight of other rent-a-tire customers. Like a Louisiana family that missed the 120-day payoff deadline and ended up turning a $1,300 rental deal into a $3,000 investment in tires for a Chevy Silverado.

The blogosphere blew up after this story ran, with dozens of consumer advocates and others offering their two-cents (plus interest) with headlines like “Broke-Ass Americans Are Getting Screwed on Rental Tires.”

Well, yes they are. And apparently quite willingly and quite out of desperation, it seems. Oh, and quite legally.

The sad irony, of course, is that these seemingly desperate people could be relatively well served by used tires – a fact that pains me to say – or a decent pocket calculator so they could figure out just how bad a screwing these rental houses are laying on them.

The crazy tight credit market isn’t helping, to be sure; ask any dealer about how hard it is to get customers approved for a tire credit card. And high prices are a serious problem, a factor driven by OEMs that just have to have that one-off SKU and tiremakers working for stock analysts and not dealers.

But it is sad that there are classes of businesses, like payday lenders, that claim to be offering valuable services while draining the pockets of gullible – and often hemmed in – consumers.

“Tires are a necessity," Jim Hawkins, a University of Houston law professor who studies the alternative finance industry, told Bensinger. "These customers are vulnerable because they have no choice."

As one tire renter complained, “We couldn’t risk losing a job over tires, no matter what the cost.”