ATM's For Free

3 Pages 811 Words

This is the 90’s. Well, not for long, but that’s supposed to mean we have progressed, things are better than they used to be, more “modern”, more convenient. One of the boons of today is that people almost never have to go to a bank anymore. We have electronic transfers and automatic deposits, and when we need our money quickly (which is always) we have the convenience of using ATMs. Of course, there is a price for this convenience. When using an ATM that is owned by a bank other than your own, one can expect to pay a fee, usually between one and two dollars. That’s outrageous! How can a bank charge a customer to withdraw his own money? Well, they are doing a service to their non-customers where, in the most grand of economic terms, the ATM customer hasn’t done anything for them. Sure, the fee is annoying, but the bottom line is people still use ATMs with full warning of the fee and therefore have no right to object to paying for services rendered.
In the past few months city legislatures in Santa Monica and San Francisco, CA felt that the people of their cities should not have to pay service charges at ATMs where they did not have an account. The people voted to ban these fees. It is unclear what they think should be illegal about the ATM fees. The main contention seems to be that it is just unfair. Well, after hearing that they can longer charge non-customers for the use of their machines and will be expected to offer a service that costs them money for nothing, it is the banks that are crying “unfair.” “There are so many non-customers using a banks ATM, if you didn’t charge these fees it would start to get cost-prohibitive to provide this convenience,” said Harris Bank spokesperson Pam Kasser. (Rackl 23). In retaliation, two national banks, Wells Fargo and Bank of America are refusing transactions to non-customers in Santa Monica. They feel the people have no right to force them to offer free withdraws. So far...