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October 30, 2007
National City Bank Wyoming MI Will Rip You Off
I walked into the lobby of National City Bank in Wyoming Michigan and approached the young teller. She had to incline her ear toward me and I had to practically shout over the ruckus of the other tellers, gathered like magpies, deriding a customer who had asked "a stupid question." I asked to see Kyle and the teller asked the blonde magpie if he was available. With a look of disgust on her face for having her ridiculous gossip interfered with, she said "he's not available." "When will he be available?" I asked. The magpie flippantly motioned with her hands, "30 minutes?!" At this treatment I just turned and walked to the waiting area where Kyle greeted me less than five minutes later.
I worked in a bank for six years and knew that standard procedure would be for the teller to say "I'm sorry, but he's with another customer right now. If you have a seat he will be with you shortly."
This turned out to be a harbinger of the official reaming that was to come.
While I was housesitting for a relative I misread the instructions that were left for me and mailed out a bill payment a week before it was supposed to go out. The result turned into 10 overdrafts. An ironic twist here is that of all ten overdrafts, 9 were applied to charges that had been less than 5.00 each. The other was under 25.00. With a 34.00 fee applied to each of these transactions the bank raped their "customer" for 340.00. A nearly 500% profit!
I felt responsible for what had happened and went in personally to explain to the bank manager the situation. I wrote a check to my relative for 340.00 to cover the cost and explained that that was more than my income was for that week. Kyle seemed understanding, but the decision wasn't his. He would have to confer with Mike Munoz. I said, "I understand there has to be some fees involved here, but that is ridiculous. It would be great if you could at least eliminate a few of the charges. Hell, I would've been happy if they would've just gone ahead and gave back just 3 of the charges.
Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. The only courtesy received for this was a short email that simply stated "we will not be refunding any fees as the bank made no error. If you have any questions, contact Mike Munoz."
Bullshit, Mike Munoz! He is the one who made the decision. What questions could we possibly have that he would answer any differently? Instead of Munoz being a man and dealing with this himself, like so many other corporate cowards he makes a socially irresponsible decision and has someone else deliver the bad news and then he's off to the Peninsular Club or wherever these people get together and discuss the multitude of ways they can gouge "customers".
This is Babbitry and brings to mind the sheer disgusting socially irresponsible tactics of the robber barons. Banks have a social obligation. In National City's case, their argument amounts to "we are keeping everything we can get from our customers because we are entitled to it.
Every Friday I go into National City Bank to deposit a check for someone. I don't do business with National City and never will. I am frequently asked at that branch if I would like to open an account. Fortunately for the tellers at this branch they are nice and treat their customers with respect so I don't say to them what I would to any of the magpies, especially the blonde one, that work at the Wyoming branch.
By way of this post I hope to discourage anyone from opening an account at National City Bank. I would also like to hear from others with similar stories regarding National City Bank.
Posted by Ronald at October 30, 2007 03:19 PM