Bring back boring banking
Do you remember when banks used to be quiet, conservative places in traditional looking buildings? Designed to both make you feel safe and secure and to inspire confidence in their products, they were the one place that you could rely on to be much the same each visit. The queues might have grown longer over the years and the cash machines more numerous, but essentially banks remained the same havens of quiet predictability.
Today, however, I experienced what a certain high street chain clearly think is ‘the bank of the future’.
I knew something was wrong when I first entered. Since my last visit, they had decided to dispense with the ratty carpet and row of sulky, stressed bank tellers. Instead lines of ATMs circled around fake wooden floors, music blared out blandly and people milled around, lost without a queuing system to tell them where to stand. A young man bounded up to me and asked how he could help me today. His plastic smile confirmed that something was indeed, wrong.
He took my details and explained that there was a 20-minute wait to speak to someone. However in the meantime, he reassured me, I could relax with a cup of coffee in the bank’s ‘lounge area’. It transpired that said lounge area was a couple of uncomfortable looking seats clustered around a table of brochures about insurance policies. Some other customers were struggling with the coffee machine, so I sat down to the tiresome sounds of Alanis Morrisette and cursed not having brought my book.
Eventually my ‘customer service assistant for the afternoon’ arrived, introduced herself and escorted me to a groovy plastic cubicle which was covered with loud ads for mortgages. Although she was very nice, I found myself distracted by the sounds of Mick Jagger singing ‘Lets spend the night together’ in the background. ‘spend’, ‘spend’, ‘spend’ – was this a subliminal message I wondered?
After I’d escaped from the bank, I realised how tense I’d felt in there. The sensual overload of ads, music and cheap finishings seemed purposely designed to wind me up.
Is it a co-incidence that the banks new funky image has happened at the same time as the credit crunch/recession/world global meltdown? And more importantly, since we now ‘own’ most of the UK high street banks can we put a stop to this kind of thing before it goes any further?
Tags: hell in a handcart
October 29th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
“can we put a stop to this kind of thing before it goes any further?”
Not a chance!
October 29th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Yikes! I hope that doesn’t make it to our side of the pond. I’m sure it will though. Not looking forward to that at all.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
just been to the post office which thankfully is still modelled on a east german benefits office,the downside the women in front of me eating a huge bucket of chicken while trying to wrap a present, nothing says happy birthday mum more than a greasy parcel that smells of KFC…
October 29th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Ill Man, I’m not sure how to interpret your comment. I’ll just assume that you think that this is the best idea EVA, rather than a sign of cynicism…
Keith, you must resist! You must start an ‘American Citizens against Trendy Banks’ movement now.
BLTP, Thanks for reminding me of the ill mannered people of the world. Perhaps the way to combat this is for the post office to pump a scented fragrance of its own into the air – Eau d’ Royal Mail.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I’ll settle for them not pissing our savings up the wall.
October 29th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
ha ha ha, I admire your wishful thinking.
October 29th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
What I mean is, the ‘luxury’ bank branch is here to stay, whether anyone likes it or not………..
They’re hell bent on giving us what they think we think we want.
I try to stay away from banks. They’ve definitely gone all ’sofatastic’ from what I know of my own branch, but I’ve yet to be subjected to any muzak. Or maybe I have. I must admit that I walk through life in a state of semi-permanent distraction.
Maybe someone should go around and get photos of the last of the old style bank branches, before they turn them all into vulgar approximations of the departure lounge in 2001.
October 29th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
I also try to stay away from banks. I failed to mention in this post that the reason I was actually in there was to close my account. When they asked why, I wish I’d said that it was because they made me listen to Avril Lavigne when I just wanted to get my money out.
Pictures of old style bank branches? Well, there’s your next photoblog!
October 30th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Music? In a bank? To cover up the creaking of the collapsing capitalist system, perhaps?
October 31st, 2008 at 9:33 am
I know ISBW, it’s outrageous! I can’t believe how much it bugs me. I might love music, but I don’t want to hear it every second of the day. Grrrr….
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:01 am
The day banks started “selling” it all went wrong. I wonder what the remake of the film Wall Street would be like if it was made now ?
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Mmmm, do you think that it would be about the interior lives of a guilt wracked Gordon Gekko and post-redundancy Charlie Sheen?