Five credit-card processing agents sit at their desks, processing receipts. They play a game: what are the stories behind the receipts? They invite us to follow a trail of receipts and the intersecting stories they tell about Roger Cost and Owen Servus.
After snubbing a canvasser, the business founder and executive Roger Cost addresses his guilt by raising his staff’s salaries to a minimum of $70,000 a year. From these ambitious, but fundamentally good intentions, everything goes wrong: the business loses clients, the staff becomes overworked, his brother the co-founder threatens to sue, and Roger must continually cancel plans with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, the canvasser that Roger passes by in the first scene, Owen Servus, struggles to support himself between two minimum wage jobs, while still having time for his boyfriend. As Owen begins to gain agency and satisfaction, and Roger continues to plummet, their lives and choices begin to troublingly intersect.
Our story-telling agents occasionally bring in outside historical events for context – the men who invented the credit card, an event in the childhood of economist Daniel Kahneman who inspired Roger Cost to raise salaries, Emma Goldman’s lover asking her to give a speech about the shackles of marriage. Inspired by the real events at Gravity Payments with their CEO Dan Price, Frank Forgot his Wallet explores the consequences of trying to change how we value one another.