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Side note: are there still places that have safety deposit boxes? Nearly all the banks in my area no longer offer them.
by bobthepanda 3y ago
Side note: are there still places that have safety deposit boxes? Nearly all the banks in my area no longer offer them.
- sampli 3y agoYes, tons of banks still have them
- evancox100 3y agoNot for long, likely.
- EasyMark 3y agowhy is that?
- ambarp2 3y agoChase in San Francisco told me that one factor is a handful of deposit box users who come into their branch multiple times/day to access their box. That’s a huge burden on their staff’s time.
- j-bos 3y agoIt's funny how cost cutting turns once normal services and responsibilities into a "burden".
- dannyw 3y agoSafety deposit boxes are not meant as active drop boxes. It's like someone using YouTube as a general purpose data storage service.
- sarchertech 3y agoIt’s very easy to fix that. Charge per use for accessing it more than once per day.
- bobthepanda 3y agoIn fact, that already exists. Nearly every bank, Chase included, operates a savings account with maximum six transactions a month.
- krisoft 3y agoShould not be that hard to put a cost on that. Charge X per access. Make X big enough to be worth the bother. If you worry that it will alienate the users who only need access rarely make the first Y accesses per month or year free.
- ajross 3y ago[flagged]
- nickff 3y agoWhat do you mean by: >"they decided to go to the mattresses" Reason is covering the case because it's significant for Fourth Amendment precedent, they are not actually involved in the case as far as I can tell.
- colechristensen 3y ago"go to the mattresses" is a reference to The Godfather book and film, means "go to war" or something like that. The fighters would sleep together in poorly appointed safehouses that would just have a bunch of mattresses on the floor.
- schlauerfox 3y agoto go to the mat is way older than the godfather.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoBut "go to the mat" I believe comes from wrestling, not from safe houses.
- avarun 3y agoIt doesn’t take a lot of deliberation to realize the obvious reason, which is that this is a very clear 4th amendment violation which can then serve as suitable precedent for (or even have a chilling effect on) future instances where law enforcement may decide to abuse their powers. It’s quite obvious that not all cases on the same topic are equally easy to argue.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThere's another obvious reason, which is that rich people have resources. When cops steal from ordinary people, they rarely have the resources to fight it even if they hadn't just been robbed. So then the case never makes it to an appeals court for the media to cover it. Or it does make it to court, because they're not actually poor, they're actually drug dealers with money to hire lawyers, but the courts are vaguely aware of this and then side with the police even if what the police did was entirely scandalous and unjust, because the victims are drug dealers. Which is how we get many terrible precedents. So it's a rare opportunity when the police target some Beverly Hills high society chaps because it makes the people who would rather burn the constitution than let a drug dealer keep their money turn around and ask what stops this from being used against someone like themselves. And when they realize the answer is nothing, that's when you can often get a good precedent set.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoYour lawyer's bank vault is still okay. Beyond that, you're pretty much screwed.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoBy "bank" do you mean one of those "customer experience centers" which offers the usual teller services and on-site card replacements, and has maybe 1 or 2 people working as tellers but none of them are loan-officers, and instead of a vault they have a convenience-store-style safe? "Real bank" branches do still exist - but they aren't as commonplace as they used to be. My nearest one for my credit-union is a good 45 minute drive away, ugh.
- grubbs 3y agoWells Fargo still offers them. FWIW.
- pardoned_turkey 3y agoThey had looong waiting lists in most places in the Bay Area, though.
- AlbertCory 3y agoMy local Wells Fargo does.
- edm0nd 3y agoyour local credit union does and they are awesome and cheap.
- macintux 3y agoMy local credit union is getting rid of them. I was kicked out last year, and they told me the branches that still have them probably won't for long.
- bagels 3y agoMy local BofA offers it, and then somehow needed to close the branch for a few years during the pandemic. Was really inconvenient to access the box in a locked, unstaffed branch.
- sidewndr46 3y agoIf you look into those, they aren't really safety deposit boxes. The bank isn't obliged to actually protect the contents or to reimburse you if something happens.
- hiatus 3y agoWas that ever the case? Even if you rent a storage unit for instance you need to insure it.
- whamlastxmas 3y agoIt's in a bomb-proof vault with tremendous amounts of on-call security and police. The second a bank alarm goes off it's swarmed with cops, well before anyone could ever open the vault. There is zero practical way to rob a closed bank vault unless there was also, like, a zombie apocalypse happening and the cops were all otherwise occupied