Monday 14 July 2008

Free Money

Not one of those dodgy spam messages that turn up in your inbox from time to time but a plea that someone, somewhere rectifies the situation within the village whereby if you need cash you either have to pay £1.75 at Dave Haggets in order to get money out of the cash machine or, use the cashback facility at Haggetts or one of the pubs that entails paying a surcharge of some sort or purchasing things that you may not particularly want. You can of course, get your money through the post office if you are lucky enough to be with a bank that participates in the Post office account setup, but if you are with other banks such as the NatWest that rpoute is closed to you and if you want cash outside Post office opening hours its back to square one whoever you are with.

Surely, it should not be beyond the realms of possibility that a link machine could be installed somewhere or is it the case that being able to access your own money without having to pay for the privilage is just another of those things we have to forgo for the joys of living in the country.
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3 comments:

babyblox said...

It is highly unlikely that any bank or building society would ever install a cash machine in the village because the usage would be far too low to justify the costs of installation and maintenance. The machine in Haggett's is not owned by a bank but by an independent company who earn a living by charging for withdrawals. They are not a charity - no fee, no machine. You could always switch banks to one that uses the post office.

6 August 2008 at 10:16
Tobireg said...

I am not sure how you can assume that the cost of installation would not be covered by the usage. Has any study ever been done to assess what level of usage is neccessary for this ?. Many people will not use machines of this type because of having to pay to access their own money. Given that this facility is often used by people with low income and limited access to public transport this amounts to yet another burden on the poor.

Changing banks is a possibility but the overriding problem with the post office in this regard are the limited opening hours.

6 August 2008 at 15:49
babyblox said...

I worked in the ATM industry for some years and I can confirm that the location of ATMs is reviewed constantly to optimise their use. The machines cost about £20k to purchase and install but the real cost is not the machine, it's the finance cost of the cash sitting in the machine - anywhere up to £120k at a time - and the cost of paying a security carrier company to refill it. ATMs are not an infinite resource and banks will only locate them where the 'footprint' justifies it. If the usage of a machine falls off, it will be moved to another, busier, location in order to maximise the use of the asset. In the case of a village of 2000 people, it is highly unlikely that the usage would ever be high enough to justify placing a machine here. The machine in Haggett's is a different matter. It's privately owned and run for profit, not as a public service.

20 August 2008 at 11:52

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