Guest wrote:All you people griping of a $5 fee obviously do not understand that banks are in business to be profitable. The fee is a disincentive to non-paying-customers utilizing the banks services (which cost a lot of money to provide) for free. It is very expensive to monitor/transport/secure cash. You people are thinking of only yourself cashing a $100 check. Well, the reality is that easily happens 20 times a day per branch. If the banks didn't provide a disincentive then people would regularly do this and the bank would have a difficult time figuring out how much money to have on hand at their branches and would also have to pay to have a larger amount on hand only to give it away for free. The bottom line... if you owned a business and had mulitple people always trying to use your service for free- thus costing you money, you'd change the way you did business and figure out a way to charge them.
Im sorry but you are really a moron. Nobody is losing money here the cheque is an instrument of instruction for the release of funds it was always like this since the idea of cheques was created all banks did it in the past for customers of other banks its called reciprocity. All of this is pretty new stuff that the banks are trying to make common practice on the young ignorant generation that does not complain or protest when being taken advantage of.
i'm pretty sure charging a fee by the bank that holds the account client or not is illegal. The banks are getting away with this because they are insolvent right now and they are the ones that control the law and this country.
Cheque cashing places are a complete different story they are a third party and are taking a risk and are providing this service for people that can not get a bank account because they've been flagged by CHEX SYSTEMS.
The Patriot Act now allows banks to collect social security numbers on non interest barring accounts of any signatory, this information allows the banks to use their own version of a credit bureau called CHEX SYSTEM to filter out their client base. People that are on this system find it impossible to get off or even get a bank account to pay their basic utilities, in a sense they are royally screwed. This system in this sense is even worse than Experian, Equifax,and Trans Union. The cheque cashing fee although for most of us can be avoided by going to our bank and hope the cheque does not bounce because we get hit with a fee for that, needs to stop so that a legitamate avenue exists for certain transactions.
