This Week Your Bank's Name is _____________

Mack Hall

Today I visited the drive-through window at a familiar building in order to cash a small check. I say building instead of bank because the building has changed owners many times lately, and I really don’t know who those people inside it are.

A nicely-printed sign said “A familiar face with a new name” and bore a demographically-correct picture of the faces of four nice-looking people whom I have never seen. Another part of the sign read “Now we’re X Bank. And you are still our favorite customer.”

Well, that “favorite customer” thing might carry some credibility if anyone at the bank actually knew me. At the drive-through I’ve seen a series of new faces lately, not familiar ones, and while that doesn’t bother me in any way I am becoming annoyed with being asked if I have an account with X Bank. And, honestly, I don’t know; I’ve never opened an account with X Bank or with any but one of its many predecessors. So I suppose my question to the next person I meet at the bank should be: who are you? Why are you handling my tiny little nest egg if you don’t know who I am? Do you have an account with me?

If Fill-in-the-Blank Bank and I do have an account with each other, I hope they will not waste money, as their predecessors did, on expensive advertising featuring some 30-something with a guitar, manure-free boots, and a cowboy hat assuring me how country I’ll be if I bank with Whatever-It’s-Called-This-Week Bank. I don’t want to be country, or urban, or anything else, and I have no emotional or ethnic investment in or loyalty to a bank, any more than I would with a parking meter. I just want ‘em to take care of my money, okay? And maybe expedite matters in the drive-through.

A friend suggests that banks might as well put up their signs in velcro since they keep changing names and owners, but I will go further and advise banks to put up a programmable sign in lights that reads: “Today your bank’s name is ____________________________.”

Sometimes I wonder if banks are run by that fellow in Nigeria who occasionally emails me to say I’ve inherited a fortune from a long-lost relative there, and if I’ll send him my bank account numbers he’ll see to it that the money is transferred right away.