Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/02/why-is-there-a-two-hour-line-a.html
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Here is hoping that the author posted a sign at that atm stating the fact that all the other atms existed. Or maybe a happy mutant that lives in NYC.
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Curious indeed, but i find it a bit irritating that unemployment is subject to bak fees.
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The entire banking model needs to be dissrupted, peed on, and salt sprinkled over it. I know the anti corporate anti capilast purist will foam at the mouth over this but my hope is that Apple gets into the creditcard processing part of the banking business and does to it what it did to music distribution systems. At least until a better, open source crypto currency is developed and deployed.
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Flashbacks to company credit at company banks to the company store.
I do not trust apple to directly own a bank. Christ, they don’t even adhere to standards in computing, demanding people bow to their bespoke conectors that if yu want to hook into with your addon you need to pay the apple tax.
I will say if apple threw their weight behind a micro banking system or something that isn’t going to gouge people.
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If its a known thing that there are other ATMs where people can get their money out without having to pay for fees then i hope there’s someone from the branch out there giving out info. If not then they should be.
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I try not to forget how much free shit I get because I’ve got [$X] amount of assets and my banking with [Not as Generally Disliked as Many Other Financial Institutions]. Infinite refunds of ATM fees from out of network. Hell, I don’t even get charged a commission on ATM withdrawals overseas, just the bank rate.
Being poor is fucking expensive.
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I dont mean them being a traditional bank. Just a processor of moving currency from one account to the other. I want visa, mastercard, Amex, and their model to become extinct.
It sure is. At the lowest point in my life I did not even have a bank account and freaking Bank of America would charge me $5 just to cash a freaking check from one of their account holders to me. Fortunately, I got my shit together and got out of that hole but I have often remembered the hurdles in the way of someone that does not quite understand the system yet.
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At one point in my life when i was really struggling to make ends meet i would cash my checks at casinos in Reno because well… they don’t close. I’d go to their “cage” , cash it with no fees and then just head on home or would deposit what i didn’t immediate need through my bank’s ATM along the way. But certainly daily life is set up to tip the balance of profiteering towards those that have the least amount of money, the better off someone is they start to have access to things for free or they even start making money for no reason other than you’ve got money to begin with.
I’m immensely thankful my current situation is miles different but i still feel that its wrong others are punished and preyed upon for their economic/social situation.
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Don’t these cards have the affiliated ATM network logos printed on the back like every other card in the world?
Maybe but in the eyes of someone who lived in near poverty for years i’ve had to put up with bullshit where something had so many restrictions and legalese attached to it that you’d have to jump through ridiculous hoops not to get financially screwed over something that was conceptually simple and easy. So people making the assumption that to ensure they wouldn’t have to pay fees was to go to that exact branch isn’t surprising to me. Sure they probably could’ve checked elsewhere first but considering little to no communication was provided with the cards i can’t really blame the recipients of the card.
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Good trick. For me it was either the bank or check cashing stores. I quickly realized the stores were a bad deal. I later learned just how parasitic the banks are when one had me write code into an enterprise system that processed customer checks and atm/debit charges. I logically wrote it so that the charges where processed in chronological order of deposit with a resolution of seconds. They told me that as far as they are concerned, a resolution of a day was sufficient. When I asked them, how to order the charges within the day, if not by time, they told me by amount , in reverse order. Not knowing the banking business model well yet I did it that way. I finally learned why a few years later when I rented a boat with my debit card on a vacation and the rental company put a $1500 hold on my card. I had made five or six small purchases before renting the boat and a few after. The bank (different than my customer) processed all the charges at the end of the day starting with the biggest one. That one overdrafted my account, so now the seven or so small charges that came after where NSF and cost me $30 each!
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I have not seen one yet but I would imagine so. The problem is most people don’t understand networks and banks have little incentive to educate them.
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Capitalism: Punching Downwards For The Good Of The 1%
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ATM and debit cards have the networks printed on the back, but it can be hard to figure out what that means: does it just mean compatible or zero fee? And if it means zero fee, how do you find the locations of all ATMs on the network? Often the banks website (assuming you can access it) will only list their ATMs.
When I was a kid, Iowa had a law that ATM owners could not charge non-members for use. So a lot of banks had “foreign ATM fees” they charged their customers, but that was between you and your bank and you could shop around for a bank that didn’t have that fee. I don’t know if there were negotiated network fees that the ATMs charged back to the customers bank or what, but they couldn’t directly charge the customer. That was deemed unconstitutional or something, but it seems like even more of a good idea now than ever even ignoring the pandemic. With debit cards being used for benefit payments, the reduction of physical bank branches, and the reduction in use of cash and checks it seems like ATMs are basically a public utility / general necessity at this point.
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Just because an ATM is in-network doesn’t mean it won’t charge you to use it. My bank card has half a dozen logos on the back that let me use almost any ATM I run across–in fact I don’t know of any that would reject my card, but there are only a handful of ATMs in the area that won’t add a surcharge.
More annoying is how ATMs won’t tell you they’re adding a surchage until the next to last step in the transaction.
That said, I rarely ever use cash these days. Contactless payments are so fast and safe. Although I do note that NYC, at least in Manhattan, is a bit more hostile to card users.
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They should be able to use any no fee atm. The problem is that most of those have a $200 cap, and they’re far less common in the outer boroughs. Most of the no fee ATMs in NYC are in 7 elevens rather than at banks. Key bank ATMs are mostly in supermarkets, with the same limits.
If you need to pull the full unemployment payment to keep up with bills that doesn’t help much. And ATM fees in NYC can hit $8, especially at the sort of bodega ATMs most common in certain neighborhoods.
They go this route to keep people without bank accounts from getting ripped off at check cashing and pay day loan spots. But the problem isn’t going to go away entirely without better banking access.
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I have never seen an ATM with a 1500 limit. These folks are geniuses not suckers.
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And landlords who are set up to accept credit card payments will pass on the 3% fee to the customer.
