Lib, you get worked up over the strangest fucking things …
“Small fee” indeed.
That they chose to append this entry with “See also: bounce” does not exactly inspire confidence in ANZ as a financial institution. What’s up with that?
I can sympathize with Lib’s point, up to a point.
A business is in business to make money offering services to the public at a cost – or, sometimes, its product free in exchange for your being willing to take the product with advertising covering its cost, as in a weekly free paper.
If a bank can make money selling its bank drafts (whatever you care to call them) to the public for a fee, that’s their choice. And if another bank provides drafts to its depositors at no extra charge, and enough customers are offended by the fee at the first bank and move to the second, the first bank will be the loser.
That’s the market system at work.
What gripes me is a given nationally known bank, which I shall refer to here as the Bank of Vespucciland, which charges non-depositors a $5 fee for the privilege of, with identification, cashing checks drawn on them. I suspect strongly this is in violation of the U.C.C.
I have no problem with any bank charging a fee to a non-depositor for cashing, say, a Social Security check or a tax refund check. They are doing it as a service, and can charge for the service.
My point is that someone has entered into a relationship with the BoV in which they permit BoV to hold and invest their money contingent on their right to issue drafts to be honored by BoV that instruct BoV to “pay to the order of Polycarp” a given sum of money. Not “pay to the order of Polycarp what’s left after you take a fee off the top” – the party in question is instructing the bank what to do with its money left in their care. Whether or not I have an account there (which after that episode I will open promptly three days after the Sun goes nova, and not before), they, the depositors, have an account there and have told the bank to pay me a certain amount of money for my services.
No, hell, I do not. I very much resent that rem… Oh. I see what you mean.
If you were buying a cheque in currency other than Australian Dollars then I don’t think you were getting a bank cheque, you were buying an International Draft.
International Drafts are more expensive than Bank Cheques because the bank has costs associated with the interchange with the international bank as well as the cost of clearing the International Draft manually rather than automated. International Drafts are not MICR encoded, so they cannot be processed automatically.
Does the bank make a profit out of the $20.00, probably, but it’s not much.
On the other hand if you were indeed buying a Bank Cheque drawn on an Australian Bank, in Australian Dollars, then $20.00 is extreme. The bank still has costs associated with the interchange of funds between banks, but the profit out of $20.00 is significant.
I would just like to say that j_kat_251’s ranting skills are UNPARALLELED! Aspiring ranters would do well to study his posts in this thread.
Now that is what sarcasm is supposed to look like!
Lib, that was funny.
- Or * it could look like that…
no man, I was being sincere! Honest!
Look, here’s my sincere face |:^|
I don’t understand why you can’t have a job without a bank account. Due to being fairly incompetent at keep track of my bank funds, I haven’t had a bank account in two years. All this means is that I can’t have my paychecks directly deposited. Is direct deposit the only means of payment available in Brisbane?
All the companies I’ve worked for so far have been rather large, so the paycheck is worked out from a home office. The amount of trouble they’d have to go to to pay me in cash rather than direct deposit means that they’d rather hire someone else that’d go with the flow. At my last job interview I was told that I had to have a bank account to work there.
That’s amazing. I’ve never worked anywhere that wouldn’t pay via check, at least.
Cessandra, from what I’ve been able to gather from the regular cheque-payment-at-supermarket threads in the Pit, cheques are used much more regularly in the US, compared to Australia.
I may be unusual, but IME, I know of two people who own a chequebook, one is for a home business, (though many more business owners trace their purchases through a business credit card) and the other is my doddery grandparents. I’ve never owned a chequebook and I never intend to. It just isn’t the most widely or easily used method of payment over here. Debit bank cards, credit cards and cash is used most often.
When I worked at a supermarket, personal cheques were used slightly more often than travellers cheques, and I wasn’t in a tourist area. Different ‘norms’ I guess. And I’ve never worked anywhere that offered any method of payment other than direct deposit, though I am wondering now about the legality of that.
I’m pretty certain from my days as a public service payclerk (and man talk about exciting) we offered direct debit and that was it. It was legal too. Even the casual work me and Mr P do is paid by direct debit. Centrelink no longer offers cheques either so even to access welfare payments you must hold a bank account.
Gee I wonder if that is why we have such insanely high bank charges? Couldn’t be a connection could there?
And what, pray tell, do you have against insurance companies? Would you really rather live your life without them?
Hey, he said they were at the bottom of the food chain. The vicious, bloodthirsty predators are at the top