For years, Ann Minch of Red Bluff, Calif., has carried a balance of several thousand dollars on her Bank of America credit card, making minimum monthly payments of about $130, sometimes paying an extra $50 or $100. She says she's never missed a payment. Bank of America rewarded her loyalty this year by repeatedly raising her interest rate, which reached 30 percent in July.... Minch announced that she'd be dumping Bank of America, refusing to pay off her credit card debt unless she was offered a lower rate. She explained that she'd been a reliable customer even though she'd lost her job as a mental health case manager. She said bank reps refused to negotiate her interest rate when she called them to complain a few weeks ago.... "You are evil, thieving bastards," she said in her video. "Stick that in your bailout pipe and smoke it."
Over the past few years, American consumers have stood idly by as banks and other financial institutions have treated customers with varying and increasing levels of disdain and disregard. Somehow, it seems the concept of "customer service" has gone the way of the buffalo and Chicago Cubs Worlds Series rings. I'm not sure where, when, or how it actually happened, but it seems clear that banks see US as serving them. Hey, it worked for airlines, right?
The sad part of this sorry saga is that banks have largely gotten away with treating customers like chattel, useful only insofar as they can be exploited and wrung dry. We as consumers have aided and abetted this miserable state of affairs through our mute obeisance. No, we're not happy about what's being done to us, but it's easy to feel powerless as individuals. After all, they're the Big Bad Bank with all the lawyers and the contracts full of tiny print and impenetrable legalese; what could li'l ol' me POSSIBLY do to fight back? And so we've allowed institutions that should be serving us and competing for our business to treat us individually as afterthoughts.
Ann MInch may be only one person, but she has found a way to harness the reality that any movement begins with a single person with an axe to grind. Even Gandhi, long before he brought the British Empire to its knees in India, began campaigning for nonviolent resistance as a lone voice in the wilderness. Many years later, his voice and his commitment helped India and Pakistan gain their independence.
There's no way that large banks and financial institutions will clean up their act until consumers band together and demand it. We might have thought that, since we bailed some of these folks out, they might just be feeling a wee bit more benevolent towards the taxpayers who propped them up. Yeah, right. We you see yourself as to the manor born, any benevolence bestowed upon you is something you'll no doubt see as your birthright.
As mi compadre Sean Paul Kelley is fond of saying, banks have found a way to privatize profits while putting risk and losses squarely into the public domain. Welcome to a world when you can literally be "too big to fail"...which seems more and more to be code for "too big to be held accountable". When a business no longer has to worry about being held accountable for it's decisions, when it can take outlandish risks secure in the knowledge that we'll bail them out should they stumble...well, something's horribly wrong.
Ann Minch, with any luck, may well turn out to be the canary in the metaphorical coal mine, the voice that finally gets heard and starts a movement that might ultimately force change upon banks. Or she could turn out to be just another lone wolf who will eventually be chewed up and spit out but a financial industry steeped in greed and hubris. I'd like to be optimistic, but until change is forced upon banks by the federal government (like that's going to happen), consumers- even brave, prinicipled ones like Ann Minch- will be ground up, wrung dry, and tossed aside like yesterday's trash.
And to think we're their customers....
