October 21st, 2003
Lots of people sigh and cluck their tongues and nod in agreement when they hear about the single-minded rape of the common person's pocketbook by banks. But when the complaints are so commonplace that we start tuning them out, we are in some pretty severe danger, aren't we? That is at the point where the banks can do pretty much as they please, and there isn't enough public outcry to do anything about it.
Banks are after only one thing: Your and my money. They no longer offer "Savings Accounts" or "Chequing Accounts" except, perhaps, in name only. No, they call it "Services" and "Conveniences" and a whole host of words to convince themselves that they can justifiably swallow up money you've entrusted to them. They will take money for everything they can get away with. See, once they start the intellectual mindset that they give you "services" then they can charge you for it, and feel good about themselves. The only thing they don't charge you for is depositing money, and if they thought they could get away with that, they would.
They charge for withdrawals, for "services" such as just having an account with them, for cheques, for using their bank machines (!!! they save salaries by encouraging the use of these, but they charge you nonetheless !!!) and they suck up money for transfers, paying bills, opening accounts, closing accounts. They "penalise" you for bouncing a cheque or a direct payment (go figure that one out: you haven't got the money to cover the cheque, so they charge you even more! And I'd love to see the cost analysis of a bounced cheque; I bet it's miniscule in comparison to the charge.) They lend you money and charge you interest, and the money you keep in your account is used by them to generate investment income anyway. Do you see how they use the money you've entrusted to them to generate a profit, and then they charge you "service" charges anyway? And around the time they run out of ways to take more money from you, they exert their not-inconsiderable political influence to get legislation enacted to take even more bloody money.
They carefully analyse their customers to figure out which are the most profitable and which are the least profitable, and target their advertising and probably their interest in you accordingly. They suck and they suck and they suck like money leeches, and they're never satisfied. They're like hungry dogs in the same room as a pound of meat. They single-mindedly pursue it until they've got it, and then they sniff around for more.
We've all heard the stories of children who had $100 or some similar amount of money deposited into a new account for them to start their consumerhood, and then they discover a few months later that their balance is $80 or $65. Well, we grimace and make ugly noises at the banks, but they aren't apologetic--and they sure as hell won't be giving the kids their $25 back! They don't care about the child and his/her plight. They don't care about you and me ... they don't care about anything except growing their operations into larger and larger money-eating monsters. They have no business plan to stay the same size; their plan is growth and nothing but growth. And how do they do that? By taking more and more of your and my money. Period.