Many articles I write are about horror stories when dealing with bank customer service reps. Sometimes I feel the rules are made to be difficult to follow not because they’re more secure, but solely to be more difficult.
That’s why I have an ongoing series of posts on why banks make things so difficult:
So I felt it was only fair to write about a positive customer experience with a bank.
Sharon and I aren’t connected at the hip and we travel on solo trips when it makes sense. For example, maybe the reason for the trip is of interest to only one of us, like when I went to Atlanta to see a concert.
This time it was Sharon’s time to travel solo and she asked me to get her the one important thing to have when you travel in the US, tip money. As it turned out, I didn’t have any $1 bills to give so I had to figure out how to get some before her trip.
I decided to visit the place most likely to have a large number of bills, the bank. In our neighborhood, there are several banks. But I didn’t stop at the Chase, Truist (formerly SunTrust), Bank of America, Nations or PNC Bank branches. I stopped at the one bank where we have an account, Wells Fargo.
Through an endless number of mergers, we have a checking account with Wells Fargo, which is helpful because they have a branch that’s less than a 5-minute drive from our house. In addition, my BILT Mastercard is also issued by the bank.
That’s why I didn’t feel guilty about walking up to the counter with what might have seemed to be an odd request.
“Could you give me 40 singles for two $20 bills?”
The bank teller said, “Of course,” and proceeded to triple count 40 1-dollar bills on a machine while we chatted about the pleasant weather outside and how it would probably warm up again by Halloween when her son wanted to dress up as Spiderman. I told a tale of when I was a kid in New Jersey and we’d occasionally have snow on Halloween and have to go from house to house in sub-30-degree weather.
She asked if I wanted an envelope for the cash. I declined and left the branch with a stack of singles.
I felt like I had just left the First CityWide Change Bank from an SNL skit.
At least the teller didn’t offer to give me twenty $2 bills. 🙂
And it’s nothing like when I had to try to get a local bank in NJ to accept a deposit of $4,000 in pennies and singles (long story.)
I can say that I’ve always had positive experiences with our local Wells Fargo branch. They were able to get us Euros for our trip to Cuba (because they offered a better exchange rate to Cuban CUCs than USD).
So while I give the national brand customer service lines a hard time, I can commend local branch employees on being able to handle any request that comes their way, from the sublime to the unbelievable.
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Cover Photo: “Wells Fargo” by Mike Mozart is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
1 comment
$1 bills? Really? $5 is the new $1…..