You can pay in clams? What does it cost in humuhumunukunukuapua’a?
I have a couple other comments on earlier posts. I use a couple dozen checks a year. I pay the guy who mows the lawn and clears the snow by check. I pay my doctor when he sends blood tests to a private lab. I pay my chiropracter and also the guy who trims my toenails, also by check. Nearly all other bills electronically. I have a US cell phone and for years, they would send me a bill every month and I would mail them a check on the Bank of America. I kept trying to get them to accept an automated bill payment, but their software would not accept my information because my home address didn’t have a US zipcode. Finally, one guy managed to do it and we both save mone and effort.
Quebec charges you a service charge if you mail them a check. But you can take the bill to your bank and pay it, free if you have the right kind of account. You can also set up an internet payment account, but their procedure for doing so is so ham-fisted that I have avoided doing it. Secret ID, password, like you were getting money from them.
I do get Social Security paid automatically into my BoA account that certainly has an ATM card attached. Maybe the fact that it’s an American bank makes a difference.
Someone mentioned paying car registration in IL. Ah that takes me back 50 years when I lived there for four years. We paid our car registration by a check made out to the IL secretary of state. Personally, to Paul Charpentier. And all to often it went right into his pocket. He did eventually start making license plates, just like most of their recent governors.
Back in 1976, I was leaving Switzerland after having spent a year there. I had a couple hundred francs in my pocket and happened to notice in the airport a window for a bank, not the one I had an account at. So I asked they guy there if I could deposit the money in my own account. Of course, he said and proceded to do so, no fee for the service. That’s the way it was in Switzerland nearly 40 years ago.
On the other hand, I wanted to deposit a large check (actually a cashier’s check from a Canadian bank, but drawn on a US correspondent bank) into my account at BoA based in Washington State into a NY branch of BoA. I tried to fill out a deposit slip, but it asked you to tick the state in which your account was and Washington was not listed. This was several years after BoA had bought out the Seattle bank that I had originally opened that account at. Anyway, I asked the teller what to do. She didn’t know and called the manager. He didn’t know either and had to call someone in a central office somewhere to find out. The transaction eventually took close to a half hour. American banks are the zenith (or nadar) of ineptitude.