ATM Charges

One of these days I am going to take the time to compose a 1,237,675 word rant about things that irritate me. And when I do I'll include my irritation with companies that have replaced customer service with voicemail, cable/satellite television, cell phones, stupid people, road rage, elevator rage, people who wear too much cologne/perfume, spandex on the morbidly obese, middle age clubbers who haven't figured out that they cannot dress like they are 23 anymore and why most of the midwest is wasted space.

In the interim I am most interested in screaming at the banks who have arbitrarily and unnecessarily attached a fee to use their ATMs. Greed has gotten the best of them and so they have applied a fee to something that was introduced to help them save money.

Those of you who are old enough to remember gas lines in the '70s probably recall that when you needed cash you had a couple of choices, cashing a check at a local store or visiting the bank. The emergence of ATMs was provided as a cost saving and convenience gesture by the banks.

In theory they cut down on the length of the lines in the bank and assisted in increasing the productivity of the tellers by reducing the number of people that they had to deal with. But the ATMs showed up and some of the tellers disappeared.

And then to add insult to injury the greedy bastards added a fee to use their machines because everyone knows that it costs an exponential amount of money to provide an ATM.

For those of you keeping score you can see that the banks saved money by cutting personnel (no salary or benefits) and then padded their savings with the fee. Lovely people.