MOUSETRAP BANKS AND THE GOTCHA ECONOMY

When I did my bills this month, I discovered that I’d pushed back my Great Falls Tribune subscription to the next month for the third or fourth time this year. This always triggers phone calls and smarmy insincere letters about missing my favorite stories. In fact, the paper is more and more a paper for high school kids. No real news, just who’s “in” or “out.” I decided I didn’t need the sports news, recipes and funnies anymore and canceled my subscription. When the woman called to nag me, I told her what I’d done. “Oh,” she said, and hung up.

Later in the week I got a high pressure salesman trying to talk me into just subscribing to Sunday or Sunday-and-Wednesday. Locals refer to those for advertising, mostly food, otherwise, by the time I get the Tribune, everything has already happened and the events have moved on. In fact, they rarely cover this area of the state (high-line and rez) and when they do, they generally get it wrong. The reporter turnover is high and most of them are too young to have perspective. The editor and publisher are way behind the times and wary of offending advertisers, like the mega-hospital.

Portlandia Building, Portland, OR

My billing cycle is in monthly increments. Since all my brain power goes into words —  literacy —  I am innumerate. At one point in my checkered career I was the cashier for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings, which showed how much they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, though I wasn’t quite as bad as the person I replaced. (“The Texas Mermaid” who took assignations on her lunch break and then ate at the cashier’s wicket so there splashes of soup on everything.) Also, the B of B was being converted to a new computer database and it was long enough ago that NO ONE knew what they were doing or even had the equipment they needed. For one day we literally had piles of money with little notes fastened to them. Hundreds and thousands of dollars.

The new cashier who joined me and then replaced me was terrific. Married into the military, she had been trained by a bank in Germany. Discovering how much trouble I had balancing the till at the end of my shift, she made us a little form to fill out. Using that, I could do it. So now I make me a form for the month for myself. It helps. I list all checks and mark them with a highlighter fibertip when they clear the bank — NOT when I write them. Then I write “paid” on the original bill and file it. It is not natural for me to be so tightly monitored, but it is the only way to keep from running up overdrawn fees, late fees, and all the other ingenious fees banks impose. What it shows is that the cost of living has roughly doubled since I moved back here. 

Valier Wells Fargo Bank

The little cement-block bank that is in the town of Valier is a branch of Wells Fargo, which the City of Portland dumped because of mistakes and overcharges. When I came in 1999, it would cheerfully change bills to quarters for a laundromat (Valier had a laundromat then), convert Canadian money, maintain little mail boxes for utility payments to save postage, and so on, but all that is gone now. The cashiers like Christmas because it gives them something to do: decorating.

I’ve always used a credit union and have kept my account in Portland. A few years ago it merged with a bank serving the hispanic community and for a while things were shaky because the union needed cashiers who spoke Spanish, but the cashiers were short on experience. I was grumbly until I discovered that these women were watching out for me. If they saw a transaction that didn’t make sense to them, they called me up. Long distance. Even the women who were down in the basement posting checks.

In the Sixties in Browning the bank was kind of free-form. At first it was a “white” bank with a mostly white clientele. Bob’s second wife worked there and she claimed that the $5 bills were forever sticking together so her till wouldn’t balance. In my time the bank would call up and say they needed Bob to come over and put more money in. They didn’t call it an overdraft. He’d drive the five blocks, if necessary stopping by his mom’s because she kept a safe with cash from the Browning Merc, and that was the end of it.

Then one day the bank came up short so they called Bob and said that they were missing a few hundred dollars and since he’d made the biggest deposit that day, they were deducting it from his account. They couldn’t find the mistake, but they were sure he was the problem. Anyway, he was white. He could afford it.

National American Indian Bank, Browning, MT

Finally the bank collapsed and for years all the merchants had to drive forty miles back and forth to Cut Bank, the closest banks. The banks didn’t mind. Neither did highway robbers. Finally, Eloise Cobell pioneered the first Indian-owned bank, which was her window into the world of money and eventually brought U.S. reparation for all the mismanaged trust funds of the tribe.

I notice articles now discussing the global ways of handling money and criticizing our 19th century methods. Electronics work for the people who handle big amounts of money that are checked several times and managed with computers anyway. They just correct the error and move on. But the little guy is back to the jar under the mattress, because coming up short at the end of the month means no food, no gas, no pills. Experts talk about banking in Africa, but not in the US.

Anyway, much of the economy is “under the mattress” or under the radar, because it is illegal — unrecorded and untaxed. Maybe offshore. But the mainstream economy is playing “gotcha” games with hidden costs and mousetrap fees. One of the writing platforms I’ve been using is debating whether it is “legal” not to notify users of the terms of service when the corporation changes them. Maybe retroactively. So why agree to them except for the triggering springs in the legal system.

Notably, Google — after trying to tempt everyone into a complicated little game called “Google Plus” in which users were supposed to arrange all their friends and acquaintances into circles, a strategy for junior high kids — went ahead without permission and consolidated everyone’s various blogs and email accounts into one big blob with implications for privacy, strategy, and simply keeping order. The idea seems to be to imitate the “omics” of biological research that try to find all the little connections among particles of the system so they can model the impact of events. Like sudden arrests or the advent of new products or the machinations of some country. The goal seems to be control — but not by the users.

BANK CRANK

This is by way of a public service.  It’s about banks and their bilking predatory practices.

I ordered some books from Abebooks (used book dealer co-op).  The debit card from my local bank was declined (though I didn’t think it should be) so I went to my credit union card from Portland.  That was declined.  So I went to Amazon and ordered the same books.  That was declined except that it recorded one order THREE times.  I tried to delete the duplicates but then the book seller (who only uses Amazon as a go-between) refused.  And then they said the books were out-of-stock.  Then they said there were three copies left because they put them back on the shelf.  Metaphorically.

Every inquiry bounced.  Every examination of my “order record” showed something different.  This morning it shows that all the books were shipped -- through Amazon.  Abebooks has nothing to say.

So I called my local bank to see whether this debit card is worth anything at all.  She explained about “presentments.”  As soon as one looks to the seller as though there might be a sale, a “presentment” is sent to the bank for maybe fifty or a hundred dollars to see whether you have the money.  It is meant for motels and gas stations where you are away from home, unknown, and at the mercy of the merchants.  Of course, they see it as THEM being at the mercy of YOU.  So she said that Amazon had been sending “presentments” about these books, even before I finalized the purchase.  The bank recorded it as a debit with the intention of making a “hard post” later on when the sale is confirmed.  So every sale has steps in it.

I can see my credit union account online and kept checking to see whether my credit card with them was showing the debits, but it wasn’t.  

This system, of course, is meant to suit people who keep big balances so that they hardly notice when the money goes in and out -- it’s all theoretical anyway.  But for me, who spends down to the very last dollar, if I slip the tiniest bit over the line, it’s a $30 charge for being overdrawn.  If I’ve carefully gone no closer to zero than $29.95, it will throw me over into that fee.  (On Friday the local bank said my balance was $.81,  On Monday I had magically gained $5 so my balance was $5.81.)

The bank KNOWS they are pushing me, taking advantage.  They would like me to go away.  Then they can be a rich people’s bank.  They don’t believe in all this stuff about uplifting the masses with micro-banking.  They are interested in manipulating the numbers, including the interest rates on their total deposits which are, of course, loaned out to other banks and connected institutions too big to fail.  And important enough to jigger the interest rates, unlike me.  (I asked about credit from Sears for a $200 TV set.  The interest was 25%.  I lost interest in the TV set.  Sears responded that I didn’t have enough assets to interest them.)

I keep up with my credit union through electronic banking -- not that I EVER pay bills by automatic deduction -- I learned the hard way that the practice is capricious and full of little traps that will invoke some $30 penalty.  Again, it’s a practice that is workable if you have a big balance and the time to invest in watching to make sure little things aren’t overlooked or mis-entered.  I know women whose days are packed with phoning in corrections to banks, mail order houses and service providers. 

My local bank has an electronic banking function but a few years ago I could not make the darn thing work.  It wouldn’t accept my passwords, it used terminology I couldn’t understand and nothing was up-to-date.  The customer service lady, who genuinely felt badly about all this, sent me the stuff to try again.  More papers, more passwords, more rigamarole.  So many ads and complexifications that it’s hard to find one’s actual account balance down amongst the frou-frou.  

There is a bank in Valier -- it’s a Wells Fargo.  I dealt with them as cashier for the City of Portland a decade ago and consider them highly toxic.  I would NEVER deal with them and evidently they don’t want to deal with me either, since they refuse to cash any checks, even with a fee; refuse to exchange Canadain money; and impose even more fees than my local bank, for more mysterious reasons and more inaccurately.

When I went to re-order my prescriptions the other day, the pharmacist’s computer was down -- it was down for two days.  She couldn’t tell whether my drugs were available, how much the cost would be, how close to the end of my prescription I was, or what my debit card number was.  She’s a very conscientious woman who takes care of her customers.  “We really need a back-up on-paper system,” she said.  No kidding.

What good is the exciting fiber-optic cable that will eventually get to Valier (so 3 Rivers says) if the electricity isn’t on.  The commentator on the radio said that in Manhattan when the total blackout hit, it was darker than the bottom of a coal mine.  The only backup was candles.  When half the population of India was blacked out, he said you could hear a thousand generators start up.  And smell the fumes.

THE FOLLOWING FROM A FRIEND:

Sounds like you have a Visa branded debit card. I've always heard about issues with those things. They'll put a "hold" on a lot more credit than they are looking for, so in a sense it would make your account look like it was overdrawn or short of funds. Don't seem to have to deal with that with a true credit card. I've never owned a debit card. The bank always wants to issue one, but I firmly decline because of issues I've heard of. I like the CC's because I essentially get 28 or so days of free credit. They only charge interest if you don't pay it off every month. Most important to me is that I'm only liable for up to $50 bucks in fraud, while with a debit card, they can apparently clean you out and the bank isn't responsible necessarily.

It's entirely possible that Obama's banking overhaul has changed things regarding debit cards. My education came from a place called "Credit Boards" a forum dedicated to all things banking and credit. Occasionally I help people with credit repair and that place is a hell of a resource for information on how to go about such things. If a person actually sits down and reads all those declarations they give you, they do confusingly outline everyone's responsibilities, but they freely change them up and send out new declarations about every six months it seems. All in their favor of course.