Grrrr. Banks!

[altivo]

Most of us have been through this now, often more than once. The place where you have done your banking for years gets merged or absorbed by a bigger bank, that in turn gets gobbled up by yet a bigger bank, until the headquarters are 1600 miles away or maybe farther, the customer service phone number leads to a voice mail system worthy of Satan himself and if you get through that you're connected to someone in India who barely speaks English and couldn't care less about your problem or question.

Back in the mid-1980s, my local-no-branches-just-us bank decided to start charging outrageous fees for my checking account, so I switched to the one that offered free checking with no minimum balance to employees of Time Inc. where I worked at that time. That was a fairly large regional bank. I was never quite happy with them, but the problems were small enough and usually got fixed after one or two complaints.

Then Illinois changed its banking laws in some way that allowed one bank to have branches all over the state. That apparently had been illegal in the past. My bank (and the other big Chicago banks) started gobbling up small institutions as if they were peanuts. One of these now moderately giant-sized banks collapsed due to mismanagement (Continental Bank) and the other big guys ate up the pieces like enthusiastic cannibals.

A few years later, that still wasn't enough, and the moderate giants started merging with huge banks from out of state, such as Bank of America and Chemical Bank. Now the corporate decisions were made in New York or California. Local midwestern conditions no longer applied. At that point I started looking around and thinking about switching to a local bank. None of the old ones existed any more, but some new ones had sprung up. Unfortunately, some of them seemed not to be doing too well, so I stayed put.

Now thanks to yet another megabank merger, even the name of my original bank has completely vanished, subsumed into the maw of a New York financial house that couldn't care less about anyone west of the Hudson, let alone west of the Great Lakes.

Proof of stupidity was clearly demonstrated today. Saturday morning, holiday shopping season, everyone is in a hurry and overloaded with tasks to complete. They had some idiot standing in the lobby of the bank asking people to come in and take a survey about how service has been since the merger (which only really completed a couple of months ago.) During the time I was there, no one, including myself, agreed to waste time on that. Not only are people much too busy right now for those shenanigans, we all agreed that Chase Manhattan really doesn't care what we think or they would have asked sooner. And if they want honest answers, they would pick a time when people are not in a hurry or else send a printed questionnaire to be completed at our own convenience. Stupid. They aren't going to listen to what we say, they don't care what our concerns are. I'm sure the survey is carefully weighted so that you can only give the answers they want to hear.

But these outer-space-vice-presidents-from-Mars who run giant corporations have no idea of what life is like for ordinary people. And they never will get it. Jeez, I could almost join the revolution to invade their corner offices and smear blood (or something worse) on the walls.

Comments

[doco.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. My mother's account number has gone from three digits in 1977 to ten digits in 2005. The bank that used to cover the municipality has now been sucked into a county-wide bank, and they're pondering opening the savings banks (which are still state protected here) to the general public, i.e. the greedy corporate monoliths of Frankfurt.

OTOH, it has its advantages to walk into a Dresdner Bank office in Munich and get exactly the same type of service you would receive at your home location. It feels a bit like McBank, but maybe that's the sign of the times.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

It can be annoying, but sometimes it flips back, sort of. The bank I started with in Fairmont was taken over and things went downhill, and then there was another merger, and things improved significantly. It seems to be rare, but it does happen.

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

Having worked for a collections branch of Chase Manhattan, I can tell you honestly that they've all got a serious mental disconnect somewhere. Honestly, they meant well. I can picture them in one of their meetings, thinking it would "touch" people to have a living person conducting the survey instead of an infeeling survey card, and what better time than the holiday season? (after all, people don't rush in banks...)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Shhh. Oddly enough, they never have changed my account number. It has seven digits, new ones have 14. Whenever I'm asked for the number, they look at me and say "That can't be right" and I have to say "Yes, it is. Try it." And it works.

Sometimes then they say "You can't be THAT old!" ;P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I don't doubt your experience, it's possible. However, in this case, I think it unlikely in the extreme.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Then they should have dressed this guy in a Santa Suit instead of an ill fitting business suit with a combover. ;P

[lobowolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah....a bank caring about its customers.....that's a joke.

I do have an account with a credit union....and while I can't think of anything I'm particulary happy with, I can't think of anything bad to say about them.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. I've belonged to a large credit union at the university I attended for longer than I've had the account now held by Chase. And most of my funds are in the credit union. Unfortunately, in the days before debit cards, merchants here refused out of state checks, even if you had local ID. So it was necessary to get a local account. And now it's still necessary in order to have access to an ATM.

I have no complaint against the credit union and a few good things to say about them. It's a much preferred system in my opinion. Pays higher interest on savings too.