I remember this professor's articles on this subject from around five years ago. I suspect this is in the news again because she published a book this January.

I remember this professor's articles on this subject from around five years ago. I suspect this is in the news again because she published a book this January. It's not hard for me to see why poor people would prefer check-cashing services to banks. I'm nowhere close to poor, and I've had to get my bank to reverse fees they should not have charged me on a number of occasions. I was also a Wells Fargo customer during the period of the fake account scandal. On top of all of that, I was the beneficiary of a class action against Wells Fargo because they used to order deposits and withdrawals in the way that would maximize their overdraft fees. I overdrafted once when I was in college in a way that would be impossible today because the bank changed the order of my transactions, and I got stuck with overdraft fees of a few hundred dollars. If I had been truly poor, I would not have been able to make my rent that month. In most of these cases, I had to persistently call my bank and speak to multiple people to resolve the problem. I'm socialized into the middle class because of my upbringing, so I can pull that off -- many poor people can't. Being able to deal with government and businesses in this way is part of the intangible cultural capital that most poor people don't have. This is one of the reasons poor neighborhoods get better services when they gentrify -- the well-off newcomers know how to get things done.