Main Street

“Banks are vampires”

Amanda Marcotte is even more cynical than I am about Bank of America’s motivations in dropping overdraft fees on debit cards. And, as a former bank branch manager, she is far more specific in her cynicism:

I was immediately instructed to put most of my time and effort into converting paycheck cashers into account holders. I resisted. As I saw it, these people weren’t f**king stupid. If they wanted a free checking account, they could have one. There were signs everywhere helpfully explaining that it was free if you had $100 to open it with. If they wanted to cash their checks and live off cash only, then they had their reasons. And they were good reasons! The worst parts of my job were 75% due to people who kept average account balances below $500. Those were the people who overdrew their checking accounts all the time, and then came in sobbing and begging for relief from what was often hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees. To make it worse, the bank’s official policy (this is standard) was to clear debits from highest to lowest amount. In other words, if processing had a rent check of $400 and then fifteen debit card transactions of $5-$10, they took the $400 first, and then the rest. So if the $400 overdrew the account, then every single transaction after was an overdraft fee.

I may not seem like it, but I’m a human being and having someone suffering from this injustice in front of me—a regular part of my job—was enough to suck the life out of me, over and over again. There’s some things you can do to help, but you have to be careful to fly under the radar, or your own job will be on the line.

So when my managers wanted me to recruit all these paycheck cashers as account holders, I went into shut down mode. It was straight up exploitation of the working poor, an attempt to get people who don’t have a lot of experience with banks to create accounts they’ll immediately overdraw. From the bank’s perspective, it’s pure profit.

–snip–

I think/hope this goes a long way to explaining how deeply cynical I am that the financial industry has an ethical bone in its collective body. The minimum wage service employees of the world may seem like human beings trying to get by the best they can to you or me, but to them, they’re marks. Banks are vampires, and they see the working poor—and increasingly the middle class—as nothing but sacks of blood to be drained dry and thrown aside.

Tags: banks