9 ms·
Siting Bank Branches
- somenewaccount1 4y agoIm very confused by this article, written in 2022. The only activity I have seen with bank branches in recent years is to shut them down. The ones still opened are hollow shells, with more security personally then tellers. It saddens me, because I liked banks. Thier gross now though.
- jstanley 4y agoI live in the UK and this article describes a type of bank branch that seems baffling to me. I don't think I've ever seen a bank branch that had a car park, let alone a drive-through window.
- lordnacho 4y agoSame here. When I went to visit relatives in the US I saw a place where you could drive to get both a coffee and then money, next to each other, without getting out of the car.
- bombcar 4y agoIt is possible to get money, coffee, liquor, and ammunition in the USA without getting out of your car. The simplest drive up bank isn't that expensive at all, and in areas with 6 months of below freezing temperatures, it was quite nice.
- taylodl 4y ago
- legitster 4y ago> money, coffee, liquor, and ammunition Uhhhh... really depends on your state for those last two.
- pessimizer 4y agoYears ago in New Orleans they'd sell you a mixed drink in a styrofoam cup with a straw from a drive-through window.
- bombcar 4y agoIn Portugal a few years back the McDonald’s had a “McBeer sold inside only” sign on the drive thru so it was a pretty recent change.
- selimthegrim 4y agoWhat do you mean years ago? All they do now differently is tape the straw to the side and tape the hole at the top half-heartedly.
- hammock 4y agoThey don’t do this anymore? (The drive thru daiquiris) North Carolina has places as well called “brew thrus”
- kube-system 4y agoYou forgot drugs!
- tfehring 4y agoIt's not just a single drive-through window either, even in small towns in the US there will be multiple lanes at the bank drive-through, with pneumatic tubes to send your money and documents from the car to the inside of the bank [0]. When I was a kid, I loved watching the container get sucked through the tube, plus they'd usually send back candy with the receipt. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5pVJ8ID0DQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5pVJ8ID0DQ
- bombcar 4y agoThe drive-thru windows are often open LATER and EARLIER than the branch itself, because it's secure the teller can open it the moment she arrives and keep it open almost until she leaves. It's not uncommon for the window to open half an hour before the branch and close up to an hour later.
- kyleee 4y agopneumatic systems like these are so fun, costco used to have big tubes they sent wads of cash and other things through, and of course there are great articles about the old pneumatic postal infrastructure in paris
- CoffeeOnWrite 4y agoObligatory: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
- bombcar 4y agoThe Home Depots around here seem to still have them but I’m not sure how much they’re used.
- cynwoody 4y agoFrom 1897 to 1953, New York City operated a pneumatic tube mail transport system. It consisted of 27 miles of tubing connecting 23 post offices and carried 95,000 letters per day, amounting to 30% of the city's mail volume. The canisters were two feet long and eight inches in diameter and could carry 600 letters.[1] Jams were a bear. Crews would travel the route of the tube and check air pressure at test points every two blocks where the tube surfaced. When they found a drop in pressure at a test point, they would try to free the stuck canister by injecting extra pressure. If that failed, they would have to dig up the street.[2] In the early 2000s, parts of the network were repurposed to run fiber optic cable. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_York_City#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor... [2]https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01870447/document https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01870447/document
- bombcar 4y agoFound one! https://www.simpleea.com/news/londons-first-drive-thru-bank-to-open-in-southall/127249 https://www.simpleea.com/news/londons-first-drive-thru-bank-...
- legitster 4y agoThis is addressed in the article: > Bank branches are not destinations. Like Starbucks and cell phone shops, they rely on capturing your day-to-day custom when you’re out and about. In the U.S., that mostly means being maximally accessible by cars. (In Japan, and other places with different transit behavior, bank branches are among the most likely user for large parcels directly adjacent to hub train stations, with smaller light branches and ATM-only locations being deployed close to far-from-station workplaces.)
- fy20 4y agoI've lived in a number of European countries and have had dealings with banks as both a private and business customer. The whole article sounds very different from what I would consider a bank branch in Europe. Here a bank branch is basically a physical way of dealing with customer service. The people you talk to in the branch are no different than the people you talk to on the phone, they don't have any real power in decisions, they are just navigating the paperwork and submitting applications that someone/something in HQ (which may even be another country) makes a decision on. Some branches don't even deal with cash, you can only use an ATM to withdraw and deposit.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoSounds like most European bank branches are 'light' branches then.
- legitster 4y ago> One way, often used regarding so-called food deserts, is to drop pins on the map representing consequential retail locations, draw a circle around them, and count who is and is not within one of the circles using census data. This is fairly naive and therefore is much beloved of social scientists, who can get grad students to do it for them. > Some people in society have to actually be right about what they publish, and they have developed an important novel insight into human behavior: people cannot fly. Haha savage. I really love this article - it's a love letter to understanding all of the minutiae that goes behind something simple.
- tomjakubowski 4y agoPatrick mocks the concept of "so-called food deserts", in part because social scientists use as-the-crow-flies distance to grocers to determine them, but compared to using road networks that is actually understating the problem of food access. (eg one might live one mile from a grocery store, but the walk would certainly cover more distance than that, and never less. not to mention lights slowing people down further...). So I'm not really sure what his burn is about.
- patio11 4y agoI was introducing a jargon word that some readers would not be familiar with in an aside, so “so-called” is a flag to readers that food desert is a term of art they can look up if they want. The comment is specifically that people who are not often considered intellectuals/researchers/etc, who have titles like Real Estate Acquisition Specialist, have a much higher fidelity understanding of the issue of access than the people society believe are largely the responsible voices regarding access issues. This was in the context of an extended discussion about how e.g. regulators with an access mandate care about maps but that is insufficient.
- tomjakubowski 4y agoOK, I see that I read a little too much into that "so-called". Thanks for clarifying.
- dcroley 4y agoI wonder how this idea will age. I haven't been to a bank branch in so long. Hell, I've written 5 checks in the last 2 years. I deposit the rare check with my phone or ATM. Why would I want to go to a branch? I took out my last mortgage with my credit union and still never when in the branch. My 20-something daughter never considered branch locations at all when picking her new bank.
- kube-system 4y agoCash. I have used a branchless bank for much of my banking, but it is still useful to keep an account open with a branched bank for the times that I need to do transactions with amounts of cash that are larger than ATM limits.
- boneitis 4y agoYep, cash. Especially in the age of: 1) robo-support with pre-defined assistance paths that are engineered precisely to avoid servicing the types of issues you will run into at critical moments, and 2) banks / money processing services cutting you off with no warning. I asked my bank a while back to send me a new card as I regularly do when the current card gets worn out and starts to more frequently fail chip/strip readers, and it got lost in transit. I requested them to send me another; however, this time they had marked my old card having been lost/stolen and closed the debit account. Not wanting to struggle with finding a friend both actually having money to spare and willing to engage in some attentive coordination, I was effectively cut off from _all_ of my cash, as far as I could see. I'm not particularly familiar with all the money movement mechanisms. I had to make the effort to get to the bank the next day during business hours (I am a night owl and work full time), and I withdrew a good chunk of cash to hold me over while waiting for my card, which finally arrived yesterday. Yadda yadda, something something don't put all your eggs in one basket. Yes, I know. I have only on the order of months been making enough to be able to entertain sharding off more than negligible amounts into a secondary account. It is on the to-do list.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoThe last time I wrote a cheque was in the early 90s I think.
- yamtaddle 4y ago> Banks can substantiate, with voluminous data, that banking relationships are very sticky. Indeed. I'd have changed my main bank years ago if not for the pain of changing over all my automated payments. I don't like them at all but they've not done anything bad enough to make it worth several hours of irritation, probably spread over multiple months, moving everything.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deathanatos 4y ago… I kid you not that my last bank, in order to close the account, demanded that I travel 1,667 miles. It had to be closed in person. So yeah, they were incredibly sticky. They also required me to find a fax machine, too, when they were the victim of fraud. I don't miss you Regions!
- jessaustin 4y agoDo we have to close bank accounts? Why not just withdraw all the money and forget about it?
- freebee87 4y ago"A curb cut is authority granted to you by the owner of the road (often the state government) to make a physical change to your property and the road to allow customers access" This development model is very specific to Illinois and should not be generalized across the country. In many places the road could be owned by a local development corp, the county, a non-profit, a pension fund, the bank itself or some combination of the above. Illinois has harsh winters, a 9-5 suburb/downtown traffic pattern, average traffic and lots of land which makes the drive through an important feature and curb cuts EXTREMELY valuable.
- jagged-chisel 4y ago“often the state government” does not mean “always.” And I’m not sure how the value of the curb cut fits into the quote and your reply. Can you provide more details?
- freebee56 4y agoThe whole sequence of: business wants change to curb > asks state officials for permission > state official reviews request> state official send business decision is predicted on the following: - there is substantial value to creating a curb from specific local traffic patterns - there is one state body that is tasked with "approving" changes to curbs - changes are "rationed" so that businesses need to request approval For example the commission of Clark county in Nevada often prioritizes the interest of the local casino's and can move very fast to remove any "obstacles" In NYC the value of a curb is going to be much less because there is relatively more foot traffic and much less car traffic, so a bank is not going to prioritize local zoning changes. In smaller towns you are not going to get as much casual car traffic in general
- hammock 4y agoThere was an article about a homeowner in SF who had a curb cut but was recently denied the ability to park in their (paved) “yard” anymore due to code. They were looking for historical photos of a car in that spot from 80-100 years ago so they could get grandfathered in
- Terretta 4y agoThe last article was off in interesting way (see the community bank commenter), this is more off. I suppose they are written as if broadly true and without caveats, but in practice are drawn from relatively specific types of experiences that are not reflective of the whole. In this article, I’d say most aren’t sited like this. Might appear like this, but this was not the algo. In the prior article, it’s possible a large set of small or regionals thought like that, but most megas do not, albeit with various ways of differing. Good reads though, always well written and enjoyable. Just keep a YMMV in mind.
- andrewem 4y agoThere’s a saying that transportation is land use and land use is transportation. This article has a great example talking about how a bank wants to occupy a large amount of space on a busy corner mostly with parking that is mostly empty, and take away large portions of the sidewalks for curb cuts so cars can make high-speed turns across the sidewalk. It’s a feature for the bank that what a town would like to be a lively location is either empty or just storing cars, and it’s a regrettable but necessary consequence to the bank that the curb cuts are dangerous or deadly to people walking along the street, thus discouraging people from walking. Add up many such decisions and you get the current car dependence of the United States.