Do You Use Your ATM?

I was standing in the line for the banking machine the other day, when the guy in front of me motioned for me to go ahead. "Aren't you waiting for the machine?" I asked.

"Nooooo," he said, shaking his head. "I never use those things." He was waiting for the branch to open.

He might have been a bit older than me, but he was no old coot. It made me scratch my head. Really? You'd rather be limited by banking hours than learn to use the banking machine? Whazzup with that?

In Canada, in 2007, we logged about 33 transactions per person, about the same as Sweden, and a lot more than France. It might surprise you to learn that of the 57,000 ABMs in Canada, only about 17,000 are bank-owned.  The rest are gonna juice ya out of as much money as they can grab, if you're stupid enough to use them.

Only 17% of Americans use ATMs for their transactions and ATM transactions have fallen consistently since 2004 (except in 2007 when they skyrocketing and then fell again) and American's logged 11.8 billion ATM transactions in 2008.

Not long after my encounter with the gentleman at the bank, I was visiting my cousin in Florida. Their "drive through" banking is completely different to ours. Her bank used pneumatic tubes to move the paperwork to the attendant behind the window, who returned receipts and whatever else to her in the same way. Pneumatic frickin' tubes! OMG!

So I asked my cousin, "Don't you have a bank card and use the banking machine."

"Noooo," she said, shaking her head. She's two years younger than me.

I'm not sure why people resist using the more efficient banking machines. While age may have been true for my parent's generation, it certainly isn't true now when virtually everyone is virtually connected. My cousin is totally computer-literate: she's got a smart phone, a desk-top and an ipad. So why no ATM card?

When banks whine about profits (right!) could it be that they're incenting consumers to use the most inefficient systems and then complaining about it.  An ATM has got to be more cost-effective than a pneumatic tube set-up and the accompanying body. And encouraging people to move to the ATM makes a lot more sense than having to staff up for extended hours.

And then that got me thinking about just how stupid it is that we have to pay transaction fees for using ATMs when all the teller services are free. This is particularly true when you're living in Small Town Anywhere and don't have the option of using your own bank's ATM because the only ATM available is the one belonging to a competitor. For while all the "save money" stories talk about only ever using your own bank's machines, I've had the experience of living in a small town where there was only one bank, and it was only open part-time. My choices were to drive 40 minutes to using my own bank's ATM or pay up and shut up at the local ATM.

Happily, I'd negotiated with my own bank for a service package that included two free "other" machine withdrawals, so as long as I kept my local ATM withdrawals to two a month, I was in the clear. But there were a couple of occasions when my planning wasn't spot on and I had to fork over that $1.50… Ohhhh, I hated that!

So, what's your preferred method of banking? ATM? Internet? In-branch? And what do you pay in service fees to use the services your bank offers? Have you even checked them recently?

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