Reverse Bank Robbery

(Photo by Ambro)

The following column was originally published in January of 2007.

Back in the old West, it was pretty easy to spot the bank robbers.

They were the guys on horseback wearing bandanas to cover their faces, brandishing shiny six-shooters, and shouting “yeehaw” a lot as they raced out of town.

At least that’s what Hollywood has taught me.

Today, the robbers wear suits and ties or business skirts (the latter reserved mostly for females).

They also reside on the opposite side of the teller’s cage.

I’ve learned that today’s “bank robbers” are actually the banks themselves.

I recently began shopping for a new financial institution where I could deposit the huge profits earned by this newspaper over the last few months.

Okay, the battery-operated coin sorter we use for counting our profits broke after the 82^nd roll of pennies.

In any event, I have been looking at the rates charged by some of our local banks, and I’m beginning to think that Jesse James wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

For example, I can almost understand banks wanting to pop their customers for taking money out of the bank.

Using per-check charges, they can make you think twice about whether you really needed to eat this week, since they’ll hammer you for up to 40 cents per check, plus the cost of printing the checks.

(I swear it costs less to print actual money than what they charge to print a book of checks!)

But again, they didn’t get to be suit-wearing cigar-smoking rich guys by letting people actually take money out of their bank, so it almost makes sense that they charge you to make a withdrawal.

However, most of the commercial banks in Mesquite charge businesses to put money INTO their banks!

That’s right, if you want to give money to a bank, you have to PAY them for the privilege!

Again, the fees range from 15 cents to 40 cents per check that you want to deposit.

Of course, if you’re willing to keep a minimum balance of up to $20,000, they’ll gladly waive that fee, which leads me to another gripe about these unmasked, unarmed highwaymen (and highwaywomen, which is different from a street walker, but we’ll talk about that at another time).

One of my biggest complaints about banks is that they practice discrimination and bigotry.

No, it has nothing to do with the color of your skin.

They only care about the color of your money.

They discriminate against the non-rich.

For example, and everyone knows this, the only way you can get the bank to give you money, called a loan, is if you already have money.

If you don’t have money, they won’t lend you money.

It gets worse.

If you deposit lots of money, they’ll give you more money, called “interest.”

If you only deposit little bits of money, you don’t get any interest.

Even worse, some of the banks will CHARGE you if you don’t have thousands of dollars in your savings account.

This is so different from the “good old days,” when poor folks could furnish half their houses with appliances such as free toasters, blenders, and calendars the bank would give you just for opening an account.

People would furnish the other half of their houses by making frequent trips to the gas station, where a full tank (which by the way cost less than $10 back then) would earn you a set of glasses or a transistor radio.

Now, you have to hock all those things just to pay the monthly bank fees, which can range from $10 to $20 a month for businesses.

So maybe Jesse James and his boys had the right idea.
It was probably the last time in the history of banking that someone could actually make a withdrawal without two forms of ID, a thumbprint, and a first-born child as collateral.