Heh. Some people’s printing is hard for other humans to read. Mine when I’m in a hurry, for instance.
Certainly there is, nowdays. But:
- this system was designed 50+ years ago. (And is still working fine.)
- all the banks, credit unions, etc. already have the equipment to read this.
- all the check printers, etc. already have equipment to produce this.
- It would cost lots of money for them all to replace this with new equipment.
- What would they gain from switching to a new system?
Basically, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The system is in place, working fine, and already paid for. Why mess with it?
Very slight hijack… but we also see a certain “military” type of font where the letters, numbers, etc are very blocky and have these “breaks” in the line… what’s the reason for this? You can see an example here (although it is somewhat stylized compared to what you see in old war movies or stenciled on vehicles).
Hey, maybe that’s it, is it just cheap stenciling?
I think you’ve hit upon exactly the right answer.
For whatever reson, stencil seems to equate to “military” or at least “Army” to most people.
As for not changing MICR -
It’s 50 years old, completely worked out and works perfectly for the purpose.
Plus, the installed base of hardware is huge. And some of the hardware is huge. We’re running around 500 million checks a month here - this isn’t done with little desktop units.
It’s got to be right the first time and every time. Mail has a huge amount of human intervention at the end when a person picks up a stack of mail and sorts it into racks for delivery, and again at the moment of delivery - it’s easy to find a mis-sort and throw it back in the bin. Individual checks get no human attention as they fly through the system once they’ve been through “proof” and encoded with the dollar amount in the space under your signature.
Misrouted mail? You just stick it back in the mailbox for another try, and someone’s postcard is a day late. Misrouted check? Uh-oh! Say, someone else’s mortgage check gets debited out of your account. Your account is overdrawn and other checks start to bounce. Or, if that’s your mortgage payment that hit someone else’s account, your mortgage payment may bounce.
It’s amazing that MICR has worked as well as it has for 50 years.
For what it’s worth, at least for us here… our printers are standard high speed printers. The difference is in the toner. MICR toner is obviously different (magnetic) from regular toner, but we can purchase wither type of toner for our printers.
At my old job, I caused a heck of a problem when I loaded a canister of normal toner instead of MICR. Fortunately, most of it got used to print Broker/Dealer letters, but still. Big issue.
hijack
gotpasswords, I’m wondering if we work for the same company. Red and White logo, 3 letters? I’m up in Sacramento.
/hijack
I used to work for a company working on new bank technology for processing and routing checks electronically. t-bonham’s response is correct. I’ll just add that banks’ chief consideration is processing checks as inexpensively as possible. Accuracy is very important (mistakes cost big bucks), and banks are very careful about adopting new technology. The current check processing system is extraordinarily entrenched. The systems and processes are so complex and decentralized that typically there is noone in a banking organization that knows all the details of the check processing system. That makes it extremely difficult to update the system piecemeal. Especially since any change to the checking system will undoubtedly result in the loss of jobs, and the people who work in the current system wouldn’t exactly be motivated to elucidate precisely how it works, even if they did know.
So basically, you have an extremely complex system that involves gigantic physical sorting machines, and all the people needed to support them. What do you replace first? How can you bridge the gap between computers and physical sorting machines + people?
Furthermore, the industry standards only go so far. If you are a company trying to provide an improved technology for check processing, you may find yourself stuck working with one bank at a time, because every bank has a different system! The solution for one bank doesn’t help the next bank!
There is opportunity there, but it’s a lot more difficult than just saying, “MICR is obsolete, let’s switch to OCR.” MICR will almost certainly be used as long as checks are used.
Actually, come to think of it, the real answer to the OP is, why are you picking on the MICR wingdings? They aren’t any more obsolete than the paper checks themselves. Transactions ought to be wholly electronic, especially since it is now legal to substitute an electronic image of a check for a paper check.
You are correct. And I use about one paper check per year - everything else I do is either on-line banking, or debit card…the only reason I mentioned this stupid font on checks is because whenever I want to have money transferred to my account, I have to put my routing number and account number and I look at that gobbledygook at the bottom of the check and think - why?
Nope. Red and yellow, more letters. And the letters aren’t messed with like they are in your logo. 
**jawdirk ** - You’re completely right, and yes, processing volume of physical items is decreasing. Between more payments being done electronically through online bill pay and point-of-purchase or near-point truncation of checks where the merchant scans the check and it’s sent to the bank electronically, there are fewer and fewer bits of paper flying around.
Count me as another person who finds MICR to be legible to my naked eye just fine, so I don’t see (ha) the OP’s trouble.