Right now I’m of the considered opinion that Wells Fargo Bank eats a bowl of dicks. This is somewhat awkward since the woman I love and adore works for them, and she and her colleagues (at least the ones I’ve met) are intelligent, thoughtful people who “get it” when it comes to the only thing that matters in a service industry - the customer.
Hi honey, your employer sucks.
Bleah. Not the way to start an evening, after-work, conversation, is it? But it is the way we’ve started our evenings way too often lately. To get the run-down on why I’m perturbed with Wells Fargo just hop on over to The Consumerist to see the screed I sent them a week or so ago about my recent troubles with WFB.
If you know me or read this space frequently you know I’m prone to ranting. I rant, therefore I am. Most of the time though my rants are sort of macro rants - about big stuff there is no way in hell any amount of effort or energy on my part is going to have an impact on and that, well, since I’m being honest here, really doesn’t matter all that much. As angry as I may be at Dubya for being a half-witted chimp whether he is President or Doris Day is President doesn’t matter. I will still get up, go to work, eat a joyless and friendless lunch alone whilst reading some book about shit I really shouldn’t bother with, do more work, get stuck in traffic, go home, interact with my family, laugh, cry, swear at the television brush my teeth go to sleep and do it all over again. Democracy or totalitarian dictatorship? Does it really matter to us little guys?
But when people mess with my money, well that fries my chorizo. When they do it while behaving in a willfully and tragically stupid manner… heads must roll. And since I have no power to fire inept customer service reps or nitwit bankers, all I can do is change my interaction with the source of my consumer misery. To that end I’ve pretty much stopped using my WFB check card. They might as well rub the VISA logo off the dang thing because every time I do use it they lock it down. My solution - you will get no more of my money.
See, one of the reasons why banks rolled out the check card concept was because it gave them the opportunity to hold onto your money longer. ATM transactions are near instantaneous (the transaction still takes long enough for the banks involved to earn money off possessing your money though) but check card transactions take a day or two to complete, and during that time the bank is using your money to make themselves more money. If I’m correct and I’m not the only schlub being greatly annoyed by his bank card follies then quite a few people will come to this same conclusion and thus cost the banks, who, by the way rammed these suckers down our throats and marketed the heck out of them and compelled us to use them more by creating debit card rewards programs, then folks like WFB are going to lose a truckload of money due to their knee-jerk reactions to debit card fraud.
*phew*
You know, if I had more work to do today and wasn’t so sleep-deprived and punchy you might have been spared this.
Technorati Tags: Wells Fargo Bank, Dubya, Doris Day, consumer misery, WFB check card, VISA logo, ATM
