I went to the bank Friday.
It's the same bank where I opened an account when I first came to this town 20 years ago, and the same bank that the Red Dragonfly Gallery had its accounts with, and the same bank that I've had my personal accounts with all this time.
This is an old Local/Regional bank that serves a relatively limited geographical area of Western Washington State, having been pretty stable at about 20 branches across three counties. It has actually been owned by the same family since 1904 and managed to make it through the Great Depression, a World War, the wild inflation of the 1970s, the 2008 banking crisis, Covid lockdowns and still survived as a single banking organization run by people for people... all without government intervention, bailouts and takeovers by large hostile banking organizations.
Remarkably, my "free basic checking" account has remained free, all this time.
Sadly, this 122-year-old tradition came to a close this past weekend as the bank becomes part of a larger West Coast banking organization. We've gotten lots of paperwork, along with assurances that the same faces will still be working at our branches and the same services will still be available, but I can't help but wonder how true that's actually going to be.
I suppose "little change" might be how things work out in the short and intermediate term, but what's going to happen after a year or two when the larger banking corporation fully gets woven into the system?
I'm sure my "no fee" checking account is going to stop being no fee, and will be replaced by something that requires large minimum balances and monthly fees and per transaction fees and goodness knows what else they nickel-and-dime you to death with. I'm also pretty sure we are going to see the end of friendly tellers giving us a call to let us know that we should come in and make a deposit in order to avoid an overdraft fee, or to check in with us that we're really making this purchase in another town with our debit cards.
I'm also pretty sure that the customer service hotline which was always staffed by a real human being is now going to be replaced by an AI driven automated phone system that'll put you in perpetual phone system jail, making it impossible to talk to a person, and if you actually do get through to a person it'll be some guy who calls himself Fred who's actually talking to you from Chennai, India.
I tried to be accepting of the fact that everything changes over time and that modernizations happen and I expect the people who ran the bank for all these years probably just got tired of being in the banking business in the current economic climate, or maybe the current generation decided that they just wanted to go in a different direction. And I can't say that I'd begrudge them that!
Still, it makes me sad to see another old institution fall by the wayside as the general process of standardization and gentrification seems to take hold of yet another part of our small seaside town.
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