Tuesday 9thJuly

Excuse me while I put on my grumpy old man hat.  Now, that’s better.

I occasionally have to bank cheques.  These are not for my personal bank account but for a non-profit making small limited company, so I do not have a bank card and therefore cannot really use one of the automated machines.   So I queue up to hand them over to a cashier who stamps the counterfoil in the book and everything is hunky-dory.

Or not quite.  Every branch I visit nowadays has a limited number, often only one or two, of cashiers and a veritable army of machines.  Now, I may be stupid, but I thought that market forces would kick in somewhere and the banks would cotton on to the fact that the serried ranks of shiny machines are not being used and the queue for the human cashiers gets longer and longer.  But strangely their response is to simply put in more machines and less people.  It is the same with the supermarkets, where ones frustration boils over as ‘unexpected item in the bagging area keep repeating itself’ until a run-off-their-feet member of staff comes over and swipes their card to stop the bleating machine.

And so I stand in line and wait and each person is getting hot and annoyed, and the cashier politely says ‘sorry you had to wait.’  I doubt that they are sorry at all, or sorry maybe that they are so overworked, and that sooner or later they know that they too will be replaced by a machine.  So, why do the banks (and the supermarkets for that matter) not learn and stop annoying their customers (because when you do complain the staff say that yes, everyone hates the machines but head office won’t listen) and start giving the service we would like.

Because they know that ultimately, though annoyed at the time, we are too lazy to change banks because of it, and besides all the banks (and the supermarkets) are driving headlong down the same road.  When will they ever learn?  Never, because sooner or later we will stop complaining and like it or not learn to interact with steel and glass and when there is no-one even left in the bank to complain to they will have won.