Arriana Huffington and Rob Johnson wrote an article over at huffingpost.com with their idea on how to deal with the Big Four US Banks (Wells Fargo, Bank America, Chase, and Citi–ranked in order of evil from Emperor Palpatine’s right index finger to his right middle finger).
Their idea is simple, and at first blush it sounds great. Put your money in smaller banks, community banks.
There are, however, problems with this idea.
First off, in many communities, there is no choice on where to bank. The community bank is a dying breed as more and more of these banks consolidated into small intrastate chains that have been gobbled by the Borg. er, I mean by the Big Four.
Second, and most importantly, it is an empty gesture. If any one of The Collective– sorry, silly typos, I mean the mega banks–ever feels it’s loosing money to these small banks they will simply buy them out.
We’re a perfect example. We chose a local bank to handle out mortgage. That bank merged with World Saving (read, was bought) which was borged by Wackovia, which was stolen by Wells Fargo. So now our mortgage is held by Wells Fargo, a company I swore I’d never do business with when I was still in High School. Wells Fargo is a shit company, a scum-of-the-earth-looks-appealing-in-comparison company. A company that might exist only for the purpose of making Bank America look like a better choice.
About 15 years ago I had a friend who worked at a call-center making telemarketing calls for various companies, including at one point Wells Fargo. The calls where part of a feeler program to gauge the response people would have to some new financial products WF was offering. If the contact said they were not interested, the friend had to choose the customer’s reason for not being interested from a list of about 20-25 choices.
According to my friend more than half the people contacted said they were not interested because they would never ever do business with Wells Fargo (again). Another 10-15% of the calls hung up as soon as they heard the words ‘Wells Fargo’.
Needless to say, “Wouldn’t do business with Wells Fargo” was not on the list of choices.