ATM fees

I often get gas at a station called Wawa, which is undoubtedly one of the dumbest names I've eve heard for a store. On top of the pumps, the store has been running ads for their no-fee ATMs. One of them shows a man saying, "I saved $175 last year," and the other shows a woman saying, "I saved $24.50 last month." The ad states at the bottom that this is based on an typical ATM surcharge of $1.75.

I'm all for saving money on ATMs, but these amounts are ridiculous. $24.50 in one month? That's 14 withdrawals, or nearly once every two days. I can't imagine a circumstance in which you would need to withdraw cash every other day. Some people may get paid as frequently as once a week, so I could see an argument for that many withdrawals (I don't even average that much), but why every other day? Even the other example, $175 per year, is pretty bad -- 100 withdrawals means more often than once every 4 days, or about twice a week. If there is a reason that you would need to make that many withdrawals, I'd like to hear it.

My bank, by the way, does what I regard as the sensible thing and reimburses customers for up to a certain dollar amount each month. That makes perfect sense: they are saving money from not having individuals coming to one of their tellers or using one of their ATMs, so it is reasonable to encourage the customer in that line of behaviour. In my case, I would use it anyway, since the bank is out of state. My wife and I got tired of changing bank accounts every time we moved, so we just picked one with a generous ATM policy and make all our deposits by mail (or, recently, by computer).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Science and Philosophy, Part I: Hume and Popper

I've been listening to a lecture series on philosophy recently, and, even though I haven't gotten past the Greeks yet, it has reminded me of a number of issues that trouble me about science. I want to take the opportunity to express my concerns here. Along the way, I will probably oversimplify philosophy a great deal -- not on purpose, but rather because I have only a simplistic understanding of it. I welcome responses to clear up my misconceptions. One of my issues with science is the famous idea of Karl Popper that it can never establish positive claims, only falsify wrong ones. The history of this goes back to David Hume, the 18th century Scottish sceptic. He shook up the philosophical world by claiming that science could never prove anything through induction -- that is, drawing conclusions about physical laws based on observations. The classic illustration is the sun's rising. Even though the sun has risen every day for our whole lives, and for countless human l...
Read more

Country Music

I noticed a long time ago that there isn't much difference between the sound of country music and rock music nowadays. If I'm surfing my radio and I come to a station playing jazz, classical, or rap, I recognize it right away; but if I come to a country or rock station, I often can't tell which it is until the song is half over. Country songs often have screaming guitars that would fit equally well in a hard rock song, and only a minority have a recognizably country instrument such as a fiddle or a banjo. All the same, no one could listen to a country music station for more than a few minutes without realizing that it is definitely not a rock station. What are the differences? There are some stylistic differences. Country songs are more likely to have a boogey beat or certain western-sounding bass lines. They also tend to be more formulaic: if you can't predict how a country song ends, you probably don't listen to much country music. But those things aren...
Read more

My privileged life

I have just read the article Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level , and the comments, and the follow-up and its comments.  The author claims that straight white males (SWM, for short) don't like being told they are "privileged," so he is going to try to explain their advantages in terms they understand.  He then very condescendingly compares their lives to playing a game on the easiest difficulty level, whereas people in other categories have it harder, and black lesbians are playing on the hardest level of all. I understand that this is a metaphor, or an analogy.  I understand that it is not supposed to be a perfect model of reality.  There are, however, several reasons why I think it is a very poor and misleading metaphor. First of all, using the gaming-difficulty metaphor implies that SWMs have an easy life.  No one plays at the easiest level unless he is a total noob, and only college students with lots of time on their hands play at the hard...
Read more