By Jon Acuff
I don’t deposit checks in ATM machines.
I’m sure it’s perfectly safe. My wife does it. I know lots of other people do it. But for some reason, I feel like I’m putting my money into a black hole of invisibility. It feels like I’m depositing my check into a shredder.
I’m much more comfortable with the drive-through at the bank. For one thing, you don’t have to get out of your car; for another, you get to use that Jetsons magic tube that sucks your money from your car to the teller. That thing is awesome. Sometimes I think about seeing how many rolls of quarters it would take to weigh the container down so heavy it couldn’t travel up the tube. Do they have nitrous they would use to boost it? Is there a turbo button? Would the bank be mad if I caught their pneumatic tube on fire because I put 37 pounds of coins in it?
Probably, but I’m still staying away from ATM machines. Especially since I read a newspaper article about a woman who had defrauded people using one.
Unbeknownst to me, common folk can own and run ATMs. I always thought there was a guild or at least a legion of some sort running the ATMs around the world. But there’s not, so this woman put one near a popular beach location.
The ATM was dispensing the right amount of money people asked for. There wasn’t a problem with the receipts spitting out or any other malfunction. The issue was that every time someone took out money, the ATM charged them something like $9.
Most ATMs that are not part of your banking network charge $1 or $2. That’s not a fun fee to pay, but it’s certainly a lot less than $9. But that was what this woman was doing. And she was cleaning up. No matter how much cash you took out, you got slapped with that same fee.
Need a quick $200 for that must-have, family-bonding parasailing experience? No problem. But it’ll cost you nine bucks extra. People were enraged, and they should have been. That’s outrageous. That’s unbelievable! That’s…
66% less than the average credit card charges us.
When you pay $9 on a $200 withdrawal, you’re paying about 4% in fees. When you pay on a credit card, you pay around 12% in fees. If an ATM acted like a credit card, you’d pay $27 every time you took out $200. If an ATM did that, you’d hate ATMs. You’d write politicians and protest with signs that said, “A.T.M.? More like R.O.B.”
So why don’t we get upset in the same way about credit card charges? Well, it’s different in some ways because it’s their money—at first. The moment we charge something though, it becomes our debt and our responsibility to pay back. And it’s also fictional. We don’t feel and touch and hold credit card charges the same way we do cash. If you used a credit card at a store to buy a $1,000 television and the cashier said, “Can you please give me $27, in cash, in addition to the price of this item?” you’d be frustrated.
And you should be. The next time you get a credit card bill, you should be mad at it. You should be insulted in the same way you would be at an ATM that charged $9 in fees. You should push and fight with all your might to not let credit card companies take your money.
Because if an ATM did, you’d hate ATMs.
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